FICTION

THE LAST RITE OF HUGO T. by J.N. Catanach (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 218 pp.) Sometimes an old guy can’t even jump off a bridge in peace. Take Hugo T., a Polish emigre living in New York. Suicide, he thinks, will tie up his life’s loose ends, but somebody keeps picking them apart. His apartment is burglarized. An attractive young woman invites him to lunch at one of the city’s fanciest restaurants. A KGB agent posing as an anti-Communist nobleman abducts him to Paris.

J. N. Catanach (“Brideprice”) has written an unusual thriller in which the quick thinking and even a little of the physical derring-do are performed by a person over 80. It’s both a strength and a weakness of the novel that it takes us a while to realize that this is a thriller instead of the subtle character study that it first seems to be.

“Last Rite” is rich in supporting roles, dense with the atmosphere of its two cities, and nicely layered in both style and content. Hugo’s language is a varnish of American slang over something darker and heavier. Similarly, his life as an amiable geezer in New York caps a past in which he has been a refugee, a soldier, a waiter and, most ominously, the double and foil of his brother Viktor, an ex-secret policeman who, after a stretch in the Gulag, has become a priest linked with Solidarity.

The problems--there aren’t too many of those--come toward the end. Hugo displays so much energy and engagement with life once the thriller gets going that his earlier determination to kill himself loses credibility. On the other hand, some of the themes and issues raised in the character study get dropped rather unceremoniously when the thriller ends with a bang.