A spellbinding, darkly twisted novel about desire and obsession ... Therein lies the suspense and, may I say, horror in this story. Told from Mike’s point of view, we can’t tell if he’s telling the truth or what he thinks is the truth. If this had been a movie, I would have covered my eyes many times. Yet, just when I thought I knew what was going to happen next, the author surprised me. Seems I can’t read minds either. And that is a good thing when it comes to reading this thriller.
Hall’s considerable achievement here is to keep the narrative persuasively within Mike’s consciousness. The accumulating tension of the novel leads to a high-profile trial in which both protagonists are in the dock. While the orchestration of suspense is masterly, Hall’s real agenda becomes apparent in a feminist subtext: the way in which female desire is judged more harshly in modern society.
Our Kind of Cruelty proceeds to events that are horrid, often improbable, but certainly dramatic. ... Therein lies the novel’s problem: the characterization of Mike. The man is beyond delusional. He’s bonkers, certifiable. It’s hard to accept that someone smart enough to be a high-powered bank executive would be so utterly irrational in matters of the heart ... Personally, I don’t think there are many men around as deranged, daffy and dangerous as Mike. Still, I’ll grant that some women readers may find him more credible than I do. Love is strange. And, it is said, men, too.
Hall brings the unreliable narrator to new heights in this disturbing narrative while subtly planting the seed in the reader’s mind that Verity, damaged by her own childhood issues, may be feeding Mike’s mania to suit her own ends. For fans of Nabokov’s Lolita, Highsmith’s Ripley tales, or Christine Mangan’s recently published first novel, Tangerine.
Hall writes in an afterword to this fiendishly clever psychological thriller that she 'wanted to change the perspective away from all the brilliant damaged women I’d read in the last few years, and reveal a damaged man' ... By putting the story into Mike’s mouth and taking away Verity’s voice, as her story plays out to a violent climax, Hall forces her readers to consider their attitudes to the sexes in a world where, as she puts it in her afterword, 'women must be perfect, men are allowed to get away with murder'.
It’s an intensifying thriller, building momentum as it progresses, bringing Mike’s narrative closer to his crime, keeping the reader guessing as to V’s intentions and the level of her culpability. She may not have a direct voice here, but her power over Mike is clear in his account of their romantic history and his devotion to her, even now ... Hall upends the reader’s expectations by removing direct access to the female character, and whenever V appears to be innocent, doubt is automatically triggered in the reader by these ingrained genre presumptions about gender and power ... Love, cruelty, passion, and lies, manipulated to serve the theatrics of court and Crave alike, where the truth looks different depending on what you have to protect, what you have to lose, and whether you’re getting paid.
Hall constructs a suspenseful plot that capitalizes on considerable ambiguity about her characters’ motivations ... But with the story unfolding through the eyes of the emotionally damaged Mike, who was abused as a boy, readers never learn enough about V and arguably a lot more than they might wish about a narrator whose head is an uncomfortably creepy place to be.
