If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
My rating: 4/5 cats
until the ending, this was probably going to be a three star cat from me. a high three on the three-star cat spectrum, but a three nonetheless. it held my interest, but i think this one will resonate more with theater-kids than it did for me, because of how firmly entrenched it is in that world. rio makes it accessible to regular folk, but it probably helps to have a soft place in your heart for young actors and the things that drive them, and i’m someone impatient with affectation both in life and in my reading, so the characters were frequently more grating than charming to me. they’re definitely convincing for who they are, but i never warmed to any of them or felt sympathetic towards them – i’ve certainly known people like this in my life, but it’s exhausting to be confronted with seven of them at once, all posturing and pretentious banter, where conversations are on-the-nose passages from shakespeare’s plays shot back-and-forth, displaying the characters’ education, not necessarily their personality.
i’m with the detective (the first speaker) in this scene:
”So,” he says. “How much of what you told me about that night was true?”
“All of it,” I say, “in one way or another.”
A pause. “Are we going to play this game?”
”Wherein I am false I am honest; not true, to be true,” I say.
“I thought they would have beaten that bullshit out of you in prison.”
“That bullshit is all that kept me going.” One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food – lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt this before.
“Why don’t you just tell me what happened? No performance. No poetics.”
“For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.”
Colborne is quiet for a moment and then says, “You win. Tell it your way.”
to backtrack, this book is a variant on The Secret History theme – it features seven theater students in their fourth year at a very elite arts college whose discipline is strictly shakespeare. they live together in an appropriately dramatic castle-like structure, slightly off the main campus – inseparable from each other, isolated from ‘normal’ people, and constantly immersed in tragedies filled with feuds, vengeance, and casual murders. further complications result from the particulars of the actor’s temperament:
”A good Shakespearian actor – a good actor of any stripe, really – doesn’t just say words, he feels them. We all felt the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character’s emotions don’t cancel out the actor’s – instead you feel both at once. Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”
considering this perfect storm of elements, it’s not surprising when life and art get blurred and one of them ends up dead. but is it the result of an accident or murrrrrderrrr? the events of that night are murky, but our verbiage-spouting narrator oliver marks confessed to the murder and has spent the past ten years in jail. his release coincides with the retirement of detective colborne, the lead investigator in the case, and oliver is ready to tell colborne exactly what happened that night. his way.
the story is split between oliver ‘now,’ returning to the scene of the crime with colborne, and the story of everything that went on in this cult-like group ten years ago; of a group of people obsessed with shakespeare whose relationships with each other were as complicated as any tragedy – resentments and rivalries, sexual dalliances, unrequited longing, blood relatives and lovers, straight and gay, addictions and insecurities and the fine line between acting and lying, onstage combat and real-life consequences.
it’s a debut, so there’s some first-timer clumsiness in terms of exposition – the first chapter, introducing all the players is kind of tedious, but it definitely picks up once it gets over the basic stage-setting. the scenery-chewing shakespeare stuff is a bit indulgent; shakespeare ends up doing a lot of the narrative work in what is often a pretty straightforward story, if you’ve read a lot of The Secret History type books, but there’s one interesting spin on the story: usually the narrator in these books takes the ‘outsider looking in’ role, typically separated from the group at large because of a lower socio-economic status, but in this case – yes, oliver is much less well-off than most of his peers, but i think each of the characters could claim outsider status for one reason or another, and the group is less cohesive than The Secret History norm (although it does mirror the character checklist of two View Spoiler » relatives; cousins, not twins, one gay male, and one major asshole)
it’s a good read; if you’re a The Secret History readalike addict like me, it’s not going to blow your mind, but it’s entertaining, and i did really like the little turn at the end. it opens up a lot of questions about what will happen next, but it was a nice little surprise in a story i thought had already ended.
three and a half rounded up, and i will gladly read anything else she writes.
