The Fury

"This novel has one of the best, most beautifully sinister unreliable narrators I have read. I remember reading the first couple of pages and thinking, ‘I’m hooked.’ The voice is so strong and so compelling that it’s like a car crash; you just can’t look away. You have to be with him in this story. Again, a bit like with Ripley , it takes real skill to make us willing to go with somebody who we know from the outset is unreliable. He basically tells us that he’s untrustworthy. There are so many things about him as a character that are off-putting. If you met him in real life, you wouldn’t want to spend time with him, but you absolutely want to spend time with him through the course of this novel. The craft of writing that is just really skillful. Yes, you’ve got the beautiful Greek island, the glamorous film star, the hangers-on, the husband who you don’t trust or like. They are all deeply flawed characters. There is nobody in this novel who is just straight out likable. This is something that Agatha Christie , who we’ll talk about in a minute, does so well, creating that sense of ambivalence in the reader about the characters on the page. That’s because Elliot Chase, the narrator, is telling us this story, and he talks directly to us. There is an immediate connection between us and him because if we’re going to continue reading, we are colluding in hearing that story. We are accepting that we are choosing to hear whatever he has to say, even though we know that he might not be telling us the whole truth."