Review: Our Kind of Cruelty by Araminta Hall

Note:  Spoilers to follow and this book is not for teens.

I picked this up because a New York Times reviewer wrote that it was her favorite book thus far this year with an unreliable narrator.  I am a fan of the unreliable narrator and he/she is enjoying a moment, as they say. Here’s the thing.  The unreliable narrator has to be believable in his delusions and there has to be something driving the reader to keep reading.  For example, in Lolita, the best book EVER with an unreliable narrator, the reader encounters something almost unique in literature: a train wreck so beautiful that one cannot look away.  Humbert is vile…he’s beyond vile, but Nabokov's writing is so beautiful, so infused with loveliness, that it is impossible to put down. In short, Our Kind of Cruelty does not offer the reader this incentive.  Sure, Mike is vile, but he’s a buffoon, where Humbert is cultured. Mike is so obviously flawed, the reader never questions that he is not telling the truth, where Humbert is subtle enough to make the reader question whether Charlotte really deserves what she gets. Humbert even makes the reader feel a little sorry for him and a little suspicious of Delores, no mean feat. Mike never does that. He falls flat from the beginning and Verity, while completely unsympathetic, acts in ways that cause problems if one is determined to find her innocent or truthful as her name implies. Why DOES she call Mike on the night of the murder rather than the police?  Why does she let him know that her husband will be out of town? Why does she still wear the Eagle pendant?  These parts of the plot make no sense.  And although we are supposed to know that Mike is making up almost all of their “secret signals,” the objective fact of the phone call, borne out in the court testimony, unless Mike is also lying about that, but then we’re in the realm of what’s the point of even reading it, means that Verity is also complicit, at least to some extent.  I mean, she invited him to her wedding within months of a bad breakup; that doesn’t make sense, no matter how unreliable the narrator is. Or did she?  Maybe Mike imagined the invitation, too? In the Afterward, the author admits that she wrote the manuscript in the throes of anger at men writ large, although she is quick to exempt her loved ones, and it shows.  There are really no sympathetic male characters other than the foster-father, and he is barely in the novel at all. A more effective rant, if you will, would have shown a decent, educated, attractive appearing guy who carries on with delusions about women, while treating them as objects and gets away with it. Ultimately, Our Kind of Cruelty disappoints, both as  a novel with an unreliable narrator and as an attempt to speak the truth about the patriarchy. It is unlikely in the extreme that someone with Mike’s failings would have been able to hold down a high-powered job in banking and hide his nature long enough to do all that he did. The real perpetrators of this type of hidden violence against women are smooth; that’s why they don’t get caught until years later.  If you are desperate for a quick read for the beach, go for it.  Otherwise, pass and pick up something with a little more substance, like maybe reread Lolita…