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DISCLAIMER
by Renée Knight
Harper, June 2015
352 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 0062362259


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Catherine Ravenscroft is a successful documentary filmmaker married to a lawyer. They have recently downsized to a "maisonette," as their twenty-five year old son, Nick, a trainee department store clerk who has a drugs problem, has finally been persuaded to move out on his own. Now the couple is anticipating a tranquil middle age, one in which they can at last concentrate on their own relationship, now that their difficult son seems to have reached some sort of stability. But before all the boxes are unpacked, Catherine comes across a book, The Perfect Stranger, that has mysteriously arrived by her bedside. The standard disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead..." that appears in every fictional work has been neatly struck out. The main character of The Perfect Stranger is Catherine herself and whoever wrote it knows her deepest (indeed, it transpires, her only) secret. And that promises to be the end of her happiness, her marriage, perhaps even her life.

Now, there's a smashing premise. A documentary filmmaker who in principle makes art out of fact finding herself in a position parallel to her own subjects? Ooh, that sounds like fun. But it isn't, really. Renée Knight has a background in arts documentaries herself, but little of it shows in the novel. Instead she has given herself a very difficult technical problem, to write a novel told from alternate points of view that requires her characters to refrain from giving any substantial hint about the nature of the secret that Catherine has been keeping for twenty years. This is especially difficult, as half the narrative is a present-tense third-person account of Catherine's point of view. Stephen's half of the narrative is set two years in the past and is a first-person account of what he set out to do and how he accomplished it. But in order to maintain the mystery, he too never gets to articulate what Catherine's sin was or why he hates her. Indeed, it is only in the final pages of the book that all is revealed and after some 300 pages of angst, that revelation falls rather flat. The tease has gone on too long.

The book that so disturbs Catherine's peace of mind was either written or edited by a retired schoolteacher, Stephen Brigstocke, recently widowed. He presents the book (self-published) as the work of his deceased wife, Nancy, a woman who never fully recovered from the death of her only son Jonathan twenty years ago. It is a book written as an act of revenge against the woman whom the author holds fully responsible for that death, Catherine. Whether Nancy actually wrote it is not quite clear. Stephen likes to wear her old cardigan and knitted hat, assuming her mantle as it were, and he may have attributed it to her as a means of keeping her alive in memory. Or maybe not.

Now, of course, this sort of technical performance is especially popular at the moment, especially in the light of GONE GIRL's success. But DISCLAIMER is Knight's first published novel, though she has written film and TV scripts in the past and her relative lack of experience shows. She handles plot well, but character is another question. Everyone in the book is unlovely, including Catherine, and when we have trouble caring whether the protagonist lives or dies, prospers or fails, then the book is in trouble. Although we are provided with alternate points of view, there is a similarity of voice that makes us wonder why the author went to all the trouble of setting up alternative narratives. Stephen Brigstocke and Robert Ravenscroft are brothers under the skin, it emerges. Indeed everyone turns on Catherine at one point or another and it is difficult to understand why she never gets the benefit of the doubt from those who know her and presumably loved her for years.

As I remember GONE GIRL, in addition to the dazzling technique and the truly startling reveal, there was a serious point to it all. Relocated to the foundering economy of the American Midwest, the two transplanted Brooklynites revealed their own artificial identities and the reader was invited, though not required, to make of them whatever emblem they might of a failed American dream. This substratum of gravity is lacking in DISCLAIMER. Coming away from it, one has to wonder what the point of it all was. It is a book lacking in ideas beyond the simple one that all men are a waste of space and some are actively malevolent. Moreover, none of them have much in the way of depth or consistency, able to turn on a dime to embrace an opinion altogether opposite to what they have apparently believed for years.

It's a book that certainly qualifies as a good choice for a summer read as it is sufficiently diverting to hold a reader's attention without being so absorbing that one cannot bear to put it down for a game of tennis or a gin and tonic. But it fails really to strike that deeper level that keeps it in memory long after all is revealed.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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