The Insult

Rupert Thomson

This was one of those roaming-around-Borders-looking-for-something-interesting books. I'd never heard of it, or its author, but the premise sounded really interesting and held promise for being compelling, and so I picked it up.

Martin Blom gets shot in the head by a random bullet on his way home from the grocery store one night, which results in his blindness. Curiously enough, while in the hospital recovering, he discovers that he can see, but only at night. Once released from the hospital, he leaves behind his old life and begins a new one -- sleeping all day, having breakfast in lonely diner-restaurants after dark, living in a sleazy hotel, associating with other nocturnal characters, dating a stripper. He also begins to believe that he is part of some larger experiment and that his doctor is behind the fact that he is able to see at night but not during the day, which slowly begins to disintigrate his grasp on day to day life.

When his stripper-girlfriend turns up dead, Blom becomes a suspect and sets out to find her killer.

The book is filled with a dark, hallucinatory atmosphere in gothic-like fashion. It lures you into this world with great promise. Problem is, it goes nowhere. Several storylines emerge, but none get developed. Characters appear and quickly drop out of sight -- there is very little consistency and zero carry-through. It's like Thomson had this cool idea but didn't have any clue what to do with it. As the reader, however, you're compelled to keep reading, hoping that this is all going to lead up to something. It doesn't. Then, after 260 pages, we enter an entirely new story. The narrator changes to someone we've never heard of before. This narrator begins telling her life story. We enter a completely different world. Talk about changing gears. The bigger problem is that this new story is better than the one the book begins with, mostly because it progresses with consistency, and pretty soon you forget the first half of the book ever existed. I actually had to remind myself that I was still reading the same book. Sure, it all comes together, marginally, in the end, but so marginally that it is completely ineffective. And besides, by then, you hardly care about Martin Blom -- he has become some interesting character in some book you once read.

On the cover of the book there is a quote from, coincidentally enough, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that reads: A psychological thriller that has just about everything." And it does have a little bit of everything: there is blindness and distortion and hallucination and paranoia and peculiarity, there is mental disturbance and murder and incest. It's a murder mystery and a gothic drama and a family saga.

But most of all, it's a dud.