This
psychological thriller begins with Mike Hayes stating that he is in prison
after killing someone. Then he takes us
back into the past with the focus being on his relationship with Verity (whom
Mike calls V). They invented a sexual
game which they called the Crave: Mike
and V would separate at a bar until some man took an interest in V; then at a
signal from her, Mike would intervene, threatening violence. The game ended when Mike and Verity, both
sexually aroused by the game, would have sex.
After several
years together, Mike takes a temporary job in New York. When he returns to London, V announces that
she is getting married. Mike is unable
to accept that she is rejecting him; instead, he believes she is playing an
extreme, extended version of Crave to punish him for a one-night stand, so he
begins to follow her to determine what the next move is in the game. He also doesn’t want to miss the signal when
it is time for Mike to rescue her.
Mike is the
narrator; the entire novel is narrated in the first person from his point of
view. He is an unreliable narrator
because as V told him when they first met, Mike is “’not very good at interpreting
things.’” It seems that Mike is
misconstruing V’s behaviour but since her perspective is never given, one is
left to wonder if V is indeed manipulating him.
There is also the problem that Mike has lapses in memory; these gaps
often occur when he has been drinking too much or when he is stressed.
Mike is in
many ways a contradiction. He is a
successful banking executive who has come a long way from his impoverished
childhood when he lived with an alcoholic mother and her string of abusive
boyfriends. He works well with numbers
but he is emotionally stunted. He thinks
that by buying expensive Christmas gifts, he has done his duty to his foster
family. Mike lacks the ability to
empathize. It is chilling to read his
comments about not caring “what happens to anyone apart from you and I
[Verity]. I don’t wish death on others,
but at the same time, there are so many pointless people out there, so many
disposable lives.” There is more than a
touch of irony is his statement that V made him a better person: “Because, before V, I was like my
mother. I didn’t care, I found it easy
to shut down, I turned away and found it too easy to be cruel to others.”
Mike also
lacks the ability to read social cues though he has learned “enough lessons
over the years to better understand what is and is not expected in life” so if
he is invited for drinks after work, he knows “I should arrange my face into a
smile and say yes.” He admits to being dependent
on V “because only she could make sense of the world for me.”
Occasionally
there are touches of humour in Mike’s literalism. The large house he buys has a drawing room
though “I have no plans to become an artist.”
A work colleague tells him about having gone to an LBT meeting and Mike
assumes she meant “some sort of exercise class as she was wearing Lyrca.” A relative brags about V’s fiancé but Mike
can’t interpret her tone and concludes, “She didn’t appear to like him much.” But there is also sadness: because Mike was holding a “tiny, battered
red car” when he was removed from his childhood home, he concludes “it seems
unlikely it could have meant anything much to me.”
What is
difficult to believe is the extent of Mike’s delusions. He is obviously intelligent but totally
irrational when it comes to affairs of the heart. He sees V’s engagement as a sign that “she
had lost her mind with the distress I had caused her” or as an indication that
she has begun another game of Crave! He believes that he and V “are the only people
ever to have felt the way we do.” And he
thinks “sometimes two people need each other so much it is worth sacrificing
others to make sure they end up together.”
At one point he admits to having misunderstood a woman who tried to
befriend him but he never makes the jump to realizing he could be
misunderstanding V as well. All he does
understand is that without V, he will have a “deep, all-encompassing void in my
soul” and thoughts of losing her leave him with “a feeling of inescapable
terror.” The reader will feel some
sympathy for Mike because of his upbringing, but his behaviour is so obsessive
and extreme that it stretches the reader’s credulity.
The book is
not a difficult read though it is unsettling.
For me, its portrayal of Mike’s behaviour is too over the top to be
believable. The author, in the
Acknowledgments, states that the book’s first draft was written in a “mad spurt”
of “male-centered anger.” I think this
anger was not reined in sufficiently.
No comments:
Post a Comment