Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan
My rating: 4/5 cats
i thought this was going to be another domestic suspense book – a story of crime and marriage full of misleading clues to veer the reader off course, with lies and secrets and conflicting unreliable narrators. and it sort of is, but it’s much broader in scope and less circuitous in structure.
with a kaleidoscope of sexual misconduct allegations making up the backdrop of any given day’s news lately, this is certainly a timely book: james whitehouse, a happily married man of privilege and power, a junior minister in the house of commons and an old school chum of the prime minister, a handsome man who oozes charm and knows how to work any room, is accused of raping a colleague in an elevator lift. to complicate matters, his accuser is a woman with whom he has had an affair, broken off just before the incident.
these situations almost always come down to one individual’s word against another, but this one gets extremely blurry, both in and out of the courtroom. i’m really at a loss when it comes to “how the british legal system works*,” and a lot of what happens in this book surprised me. juries aren’t permitted transcripts of the testimonies during deliberation? this is something i did not know! and the expectations of the lawyers, the process, the way so much came down to semantics, parsing utterances, body language, the particulars of ripped underclothes – it’s all over a messy case filled with lies and shifting (and shifty) perspectives, further complicated (and jeopardized) by the ulterior motives of the prosecuting attorney.
there’s some interesting stuff to chew on here about consent, gray areas, entitlement, gender and culpability, not just specific to this court case, but in the private reflections of the characters, and in their various backstories. i appreciated these ideas being raised and acknowledged, filtered through individual POVs, even if i disagree with some of the observations made by james and by the female characters as well. but that’s the point of littrature, right? black-and-white is boring; there’s more nourishing food for thought in the in-between.
as far as structure, it’s not a tricksy book filled with twists, not really. there’s ambiguity, and i guess one “something” that i figured out early on, but i couldn’t make the facts fit to support it, which was frustrating, since nearly everything lined up and my brain kept telling me what was what, and i felt so stupid later when i realized how easy a hurdle those stubborn “facts” were to clear. but it’s more a character-driven social/legal narrative than a thriller of any stripe; definitely more “book club option” than “vacation escapist book.”
* i’m no better at “how british government works,” if we’re being honest. some of it the book explains really well, but i know i’m missing a lot of the nuance, particularly in the hierarchies, so i don’t register when the “minister of thus-and-such” becoming the “minister of this-and-that” is a demotion or a lateral move or what. oh, and i was an innocent babe about what “anal chugging” was, although i could have done without this knowledge. i’ve just googled it now, and the anal chugging the internet seems to know all about, involving a forceful self-administered alcohol enema is very different from the thing called “anal chugging” in this book, and i don’t know what to make of that discrepancy, but i do not have the inclination to research either practice any further. my search history is damning enough as it is.
okay – i caved. i discovered it is the secondary definition on urbandictionary.com. and now i shall clear my cache.
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is not sarah vaughan
