Read it in: probably 10 days
As you might have guessed, anything to do with mass murder and children makes me fascinated. My choice in books to read really does reflect this, I feel. At first, when this book came out a couple of years ago, I dismissed it as airport novel material, you know, with the hooking plotline that keeps you reading but really with no literary significance. So it was finally seeing it for a very decent price at my favourite second hand book stall, along with the tag that it had won the Orange Prize (not quite sure how the Orange Prize differs from other prizes, but it certainly is a recommendation in itself), I decided I had to buy it and read it.
If you don’t already know, the basic premise is that our protagonist Eva is trying to come to terms with the fact that her son killed several of his classmates and is now in jail. Eva wonders, of course, what went wrong, and spends much of the book trying to come to terms with a son she never really learned to love.
This book surprised me in more ways than one. First of all, the characters were not entirely likeable. Most of them had likeable aspects, but the unlikeable ones were perhaps emphasised more than the likeable ones. At the heart of it, it is about blame, and most of the book revolves around the question of whether Kevin’s mother can really be called responsible, at least in part, for Kevin’s deed. It starts right back at the beginning, even before the conception of Kevin, going through every stage of his life with incredible detail. We hear about all his exploits as a child, Eva’s attempts to love him despite these, the hardships the small family go through and the shocking events that occur at Kevin’s hand.
I described it to my mother as a ‘parental horror story’. It is horror in a sense, but probably a type of horror most affective for people who have had children. It is about a child who seems to have gone wrong in every way, yet there is nothing in the child’s upbringing that is abnormal in any way. Kevin as a child and as an adolescent was never happy with his place in the world, was never happy with the world itself. He was the child that was impossible to understand, impossible to please, impossible to punish, who loved to destroy and injure others. Yes, I found it a little chilling.
Shriver does write well, I have to say. She (yes, Lionel is a she) creates a great sense of suspense throughout the book, written as letters from Eva to her husband, through which we grasp some details of the actual events but not all. It is only at the very end that we realise what exactly occurred, in its full-blown, descriptive horror.
And like most things I enjoy reading, it delves into the philosophical aspects to this question. Shriver talks about good and evil, about nature vs. nurture, about motherly love, distrust, hate, apathy and infamy. Shriver depicts only one family whose child commits a school shooting – yet these things occur several times a year, therefore there must be hundreds of families by now who go through a very similar process to this. Something that you would usually pass off, thinking more about the victims of such a tragedy than the perpetrator, as almost cliched these days becomes something big, a 450 page epic detailing decades of life.
It’s quite depressing, it definitely doesn’t leave you with much hope left, so read something happy once you finish it.
Read it if you: don’t mind tragedy, are interested in any of the philosophical things listed above, want a different kind of psychological horror
While reading listen to: Metric Help I’m Alive (Acoustic), Florence + The Machine No Light No Light, U2 Numb
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