Disclaimer by Renée Knight
My rating: 2/5 cats
call the structural engineers
this has a really strong premise, but it’s poorly executed and once i started my review, the things that bothered me became even more glaring, so i’m changing my earlier charitable 3 stars cats to 2. sorry. i think i’ve mentioned before how a star (rating)* is born, karen-style. every book starts out a 4-cat book in my mind, and as i read, cats either attach or fall off. it’s a process i half-acknowledge during the read before i make my final call. this became a 3 pretty early on, but there was something at the end that made me so grumpy i had to dock it one more.
if you want a quick, breezy summer thriller for the vacation, this is fine. there are several scenes of smart, tricksy writing where characters perceive or interpret the actions of others incorrectly but logically in terms of their own perspective that are very well-handled, but it also managed to push my personal “things that piss me off in books” buttons, where characters act against all normal human behavior but boy those actions sure do sustain the central misunderstanding until it is book-length! i’m being a broken record here, but i get so KAREN SMASH every time there’s some conflict that could be resolved in five minutes, and would be resolved in five minutes in any real-world scenario, but in the hands of a writer who can’t think of any other way to build tension, a simple conversation is avoided or mishandled so that a misunderstanding can snowball and pick up additional misunderstandings along the way until you have a situation where lives are destroyed for no reason at all. and that’s drama.
the basic premise is that catherine ravenscroft, award-winning documentary filmmaker, wife of the incredibly supportive and considerate lawyer robert, mother of the twenty-five-year-old drug-addled layabout nicholas, receives a book in the mail. she doesn’t remember ordering it, but she decides to read it anyway. as she reads it, she realizes it is about her; about a secret she has been keeping for twenty years. a copy of the book has also been given to nicholas, and although he doesn’t recognize the events he was a part of when he was only five years old, catherine fears exposure, and begins to investigate who is behind the novel.
it alternates between catherine’s 3rd-person storyline and the 1st-person storyline of stephen brigstocke – disgraced teacher, widower of his beloved nancy, and catherine’s nemesis. the two of them engage in a game of cat and mouse with many twists and turns in which characters behave unnaturally and horrible things happen in the name of revenge. it’s a thriller. you know the shape of this.
this book got good reviews in kirkus, pw, new york times, etc. and i am really confused about what they’re seeing that i’m not.
while i understand that psych suspense is big right now and everyone’s still looking to ca$h in on the new Gone Girl, this thing just falls apart under any post-read/reveal scrutiny.
this is the central event of the book, which includes details that some might find spoilery, but are included in the PW review, so i feel okay about typing out here, but you be the judge of your own sensitivities to spoilers and i’m going to keep typing and typing until you make that determination for yourself and i will be putting stuff later into true-spoiler tags and this is just basic plot stuff and if you are still reading right now you are committing to knowing what some might consider spoilers but really aren’t and i don’t want to hear any whining about it later because you are going into this with your eyes wide open and with a pretty fair warning, i think.
so – the twenty-years-ago events which are this novel’s narrative drive, unclouded by character-perspective are: business calls robert away from a family holiday in spain, leaving catherine and five-year-old nicholas alone. catherine comes into contact with stephen and nancy’s nineteen-year-old son jonathan. on their last day of the holiday, nicholas is swept out to sea and jonathan rushes in to save him. nicholas is saved, but jonathan is drowned. catherine never tells robert about the incident or the events leading up to it, and jonathan’s death destroys his parents, particularly nancy, who goes a little mad. when the film from jonathan’s camera is developed, sexxytime photos of catherine are found, which nancy hides. nancy meets with catherine five years after jonathan’s death and then writes a caustic, unpublished, novel about the events leading up to jonathan’s death which stephen finds in a desk drawer, years after nancy’s death, along with the photographs.
we’re gonna go to spoilertown now. and i’m going to be super spoilery in here. so don’t come in if you’re gonna regret it and yell at me after.
View Spoiler »so, in the book nancy writes and stephen sends on to catherine, robert, and nicholas, catherine and jonathan have a torrid seaside affair and catherine is portrayed as a terrible and careless mother who preys on poor sweet lovestruck jonathan who selflessly dies while rescuing her son while she’s too consumed with selfish lust to look after him properly.
but this is what really happened: after catherine and nicholas were left in spain by robert, she kept seeing jonathan, this handsome young guy with a camera everywhere she went, seemingly taking pictures of her. she is flattered by the attention and engages in that mild flirtation/fantasy of a pretty lady on holiday. he never comes near her and they never speak. she casually acknowledges the possibility of an affair in her head, but indulges in no more than a long-distance smile. until the night she forgets her keys in her hotel door, and he comes in with a knife and forces her to pose for his camera and then rapes her for hours. nicholas is sleeping in the room next door, and she doesn’t want to put him in danger, so she doesn’t scream or fight back – she endures the situation until it is over.
the next morning, she goes to the beach with nicholas, and buys him an inflatable dinghy to play with on the sand. she is exhausted and overwhelmed by her ordeal and falls asleep on the beach, and nicholas is swept into the sea. jonathan is there, still stalking her, and for unknown reasons he rushes to save nicholas, but drowns in the process. catherine figures his death is closure enough and resolves to keep everything a secret since nicholas doesn’t even seem to realize he was in danger in the water.
the only story that jonathan’s parents could have known was that their son died while rescuing a little boy. when nancy develops the photographs and meets with catherine, she finds her “cold” and unfeeling about jonathan, but catherine never tells her what really happened. nancy writes the book based on assumptions and paints catherine as she sees her – a woman unmoved by the death of her lover, not as she really is – a victim who has no reason to be sympathetic over her attacker’s death.
so here are my problems.
since the only thing in nancy’s book that had any truth in it was the rescue of nicholas and the death of jonathan, what was catherine so freaked out about? because she is freaked out from the very beginning, and that incident would have occurred at the end of the book. how would she have recognized her own situation in this erotic tale of holiday infidelity? sure, it’s eerie in its specific details, compiled as it was from jonathan’s photographs and news reports, but there would have been nothing except that one scene to have spooked catherine.
and for me, if i get some crappy-looking self-published book in the mail that i did not ask for, it’s not going to the top of my to-read pile. how could stephen have known that she (and more notably nicholas , who isn’t portrayed as a reader) would read it, or read it anytime soon? his whole plan hinges upon her not only reading it right away (and he gets impatient when her change of address delays her reading it and goes to her former residence to confront her (more on this later)), but also on her going to this cheesy little website he’s set up for the book and WRITING A REVIEW OF IT. he watches that site like it’s his job, as though anyone receiving an unsolicited book, whether or not it’s creepily similar to their own lives (and this one isn’t for so long), would seek out the book’s website and review the book. as though that’s obligatory. or normal. i know i wouldn’t. i would have flipped through it, seen the erotic passages and said – “yeah, not for me,” and into the stacks it would have gone.
also, red herrings. i understand why they are necessary in a thriller like this. you want to keep the reader guessing; to build tension and create a little puzzle-box of intrigue, but the problem with that is when a reader finally learns what is going on, there’s going to be an impulse to flip back and revisit the situations with full knowledge, and if those tricks are only there to mislead the reader and make no sense at all narratively, it weakens the whole structure. in a sort of parallel version of this weakness – that movie the strangers which pisses me off for having one of the best trailers ever, but being very disappointing in execution. in that movie, there are several “jump” moments where the killers emerge from behind something and the audience is supposed to go “EEEK!” except there were times when none of the characters were even onscreen. and i’m not talking about the “gliding through the background” shots in the early part of the home invasion – those were great. but there were LOOK AT ME I’M SPOOKY parts that were done only for the benefit of the audience, which totally undermines the tension of the story by calling attention to the fact that it’s a construct for you, not the characters. which happens here, in a completely unnecessary red herring.
in one of stephen’s earliest chapters, he finds a series of sexxy photographs in one of nancy’s purses when he is finally getting rid of her belongings years after her death. he is describing the photos, leaving out identity of the model, and his reaction to them is extreme – he feels intense betrayal and anger. he is hurt and furious that nancy had these photos and kept them hidden all these years. he imagines her looking at them in private and relishing this secret she is keeping from him and he then trashes the house looking for anything else she might have been hiding. so we assume the photographs are of nancy, and that he has discovered proof of her infidelity. but they’re not of nancy, are they? they’re of catherine. so why on earth would he get so upset at finding them? why is it a big betrayal to find sexy photographs of some lady your son boinked? why ransack the house? and this is before he finds the manuscript, so does he even know what catherine looks like or what the photos seem to signify? does he think nancy was having an affair with catherine? and if he does know it is catherine, why would the subject be referred to as “she,” (implying he recognizes the model) instead of “a woman,” (indicating that he doesn’t know who it is), or “catherine?” (indicating that he does know who she is). the obfuscation is solely for the reader, to mislead. and it’s such a temporary detour – we are going to learn all about those photographs later, so there’s no reason to be coy here. it’s creating a mystery where there is no need for a mystery.
another example of things done to trick the reader that don’t serve the story is when stephen goes to the house where he thinks catherine still lives when he’s not getting any indication that she’s read the book. it’s completely false tension because there is no risk. the author knows she doesn’t live there, so it’s “safe” to send stephen there, after which he retreats into the shadows once more instead of finding catherine for real and confronting her. it’s illogical that he would have made the move towards confrontation and then dropped the matter.
ugh, and this – the incident in jonathan’s flat, where stephen enters the room with the terrible smell and discovers A body. Rotting. Neck broken, mouth open, teeth bared, giving off that inside-out stench of putrefaction. I should have known. Death. Always leaving its predatory stench, like a lusty tomcat long after it has left the scene. I found a plastic bag in the kitchen, and wearing it like a glove, picked up the whole thing, trap and mouse, and disposed of it in the kitchen bin.
hahaahah oh, silly reader! did you think it was a HUMAN body? gotcha! we have fun, right?
and the whole revenge situation makes no sense. this is the situation as stephen understands it: jonathan died saving the life of the son of his lover. does this really justify such an elaborate revenge-plot? even for a grieving husband/father with a history of erratic behavior who is going a little mad himself? because this is a lot of work on his end. he never thinks that catherine killed his son, just that she had an affair with him and her inattention put her own son in harm’s way. jonathan chose his heroic fate, it’s not on catherine. is stephen just after a public acknowledgment of catherine’s infidelity? because that’s all she’s guilty of, in the facts as stephen knows them, and his reaction is a bit overwrought. and for that matter – since jonathan died suddenly and unexpectedly, before he had a chance to talk to anyone, why doesn’t stephen ever question the authority of nancy’s account? he knows jonathan would have died without being able to tell nancy about the events, so why is he taking it at face value?
catherine. she has been keeping her assault a secret for twenty years. fine – jonathan is dead, he can’t be prosecuted for his crime, and i buy that she feels shame and guilt – for smiling at jonathan, for accidentally leaving the keys in the door, for not screaming and for going along with he photographs to protect nicholas. it’s sad that she felt complicit, but that’s not uncommon. however, she had the wherewithal to collect the semen from inside of her afterward, she photographs her injuries – she was prepared to go to the authorities, even though she had some really foolish concerns about being believed (really, catherine? the bartender wouldn’t have remembered that this guy ordered two glasses of wine, one for an empty chair? he would have – what – just inserted you into his memory? ridiculous.) so her only crime is being so exhausted after being kept up all night being raped at knifepoint that she dozes off on the beach and her son nearly drowns. and for THIS, she never tells her husband. and for THIS she still refuses to tell him after he confronts her with the photographs. and for THIS she risks her marriage and her relationship with her son for twenty years. and the reason she gives for not telling her husband the truth when he shows her the pictures and accuses her of infidelity is because she’d never told anyone before. her first reassurance to robert is that nicholas never knew. not “i was raped,” but the vague and damning assertion that nicholas never knew. as though that’s what’s important here.
She wanted to make him understand why she hadn’t told him. It wasn’t for her, it was for them. For Robert, but mainly for Nick. Her silence had been to protect their son and Jonathan’s death had sealed it.
how would nicholas be hurt by her telling her husband that she’d been raped? oh, right, because THE READER still doesn’t know. and It is almost a relief that Robert knows now, about the death anyway. He has a right to know that much at least. because the death of some guy robert (and the reader) thinks she had an affair with is the important thing? and not the actually important part that she was assaulted? that is the stupidest thing i have ever heard. it ONLY happens so that the tension can be drawn out and the reader will continue to think that she had an affair. because – drama.
She wishes she was brave enough to tell him. She wishes she had been brave enough to tell him back then. But she wasn’t. And now it is too late. It was twenty years ago. If she told him now he would never understand. He would be blinded by the fact that, for all this time, she has kept a secret from him. She has withheld something that he would feel he had a right to know. He is our son, for Christ’s sake, she hears him say.
again – the real situation has nothing to do with nicholas. this is all pointless distraction to keep the reader in the dark as long as possible. yawn.
and when robert finally learns the truth she gets MAD at him for his reaction.
She needs to forgive, but she cannot. She cannot forgive him because she has watched him over the last few weeks manage the idea of her being raped so much more easily than he had managed the idea of her having an affair. Of course he was upset and angry: he felt impotent; he hadn’t been there to protect her. But it seems to Catherine that the new truth he was offered was easier for him to swallow than adultery. When she is at her most brutal, she thinks that, given the choice, he would rather she have suffered than to have enjoyed a burst of illicit pleasure.
her anger at robert makes no sense from what we know of them as characters. yes, robert was angry when he thought she had an affair, but he has consistently been painted as a good guy who never raises his voice and hates confrontation and someone who has been married to a good guy for over twenty years would recognize that he would find it much easier to accept that she had been a victim of a crime that could happen to anyone than that the woman he loved had willfully chosen to hurt him.
and why is this woman, who is in a high-powered career surrounded by people who respect her, who is capable and intelligent, why is she suddenly paralyzed and unable to talk to her husband who has been pointedly and repeatedly portrayed as supportive to a fault before this? why can’t she just have that one conversation? yeah, it’s difficult and emotional and it would have been hard to explain to robert why she’d kept it a secret for so long, but is it worth ruining a marriage over, to allow someone to believe you had an affair instead of that you were assaulted? just because you had never told anyone before? and because you were pissed that he couldn’t tell that you were afraid in those pictures when you were apparently doing a good job of playing along? this is not how people act. and everyone at work turns on her? and she starts flying into these ‘roid rages? but STILL she won’t tell the truth and lets everyone think she’s just some flake who had an affair? and robert of super-considerate mien turns into a monster of rage and cruelty and STILL you keep your mouth shut? come on!
and this is just clumsy writing – in nancy’s book, catherine is all shy about her older, post-baby body and doesn’t want the young hot jonathan to see her naked because of her ceasarian scar? when she has been wearing a tiny bikini throughout this? which as far as i know about fashion, would have exposed her ceasarian scar already?? « Hide Spoiler
i have been writing this review for HOURS because i keep being reminded of more things that really stuck in my craw. here’s one more:
I saw the characters leap from the page, alive, fully formed. Fleshed out and breathing. My hand, slippery yet firm, ejaculating the words as they flowed from Nancy into me.
gross.
so, yeah, disclaimer – i did not like this book.
*wordplay doesn’t work with “cats.” pity.
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