Book Review - The Sort-Of Truth About "The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair."

This is a Catch 22 every reader both longs for and fears – what happens if you read a book so wonderfully, thoroughly and genuinely good that you cannot wait to talk about it with, well, everyone – but it has so many delightful plot twists, turns, revelations and about-faces that you actually can’t talk about it in case you spoil it completely?

That’s where I am right now. How to review a book without ruining it? Or rather, how to describe all that’s good about it without – well, you know – actually telling you too much about what’s good about it? Let’s give it a whirl.

I picked this up expecting a standard thriller. However, all the cover hyperbole proved to be right. This is a thoroughly post-modern novel, playing affectionately with structure and reader expectations of genre. With every twist, it constantly snaps the reader out of their armchair complacency and instead actively engages them in interpreting and analysing the text. In this excellent novel by Joel Drucker, the concept of how writers – and their readers- create meaning is explored and exposed.

Our narrator, Marcus Goldman, has become wildly successful for writing the very book you are reading – instantly making you question exactly what we can accept as truth. Can we ever trust what is written? Marcus is incredibly close to his mentor, old university professor and legendary US author Harry Quebert, whose renown is based on a quasi-mythical book he wrote in 1975. This is also the same year that local teenager, Nola Kellergan, went missing. Her whereabouts remained a mystery - until the present day, when her body is discovered in Quebert’s backyard, along with the manuscript copy of his famous work. Marcus sets out to exonerate his old friend by discovering what truly happened that summer.

Each chapter starts with a snippet of an ongoing dialogue between Marcus and Quebert, who is imparting his wisdom through setting down his rules for writing. Each serves to indicate the action, themes and irony abounding in the continuance and changes of plot in each subsequent chapter, serving as a meditation on the role of the writer in creating (and recreating) life. It’s an obvious parallel to how we create meaning in our own lives; how our own unique perspective weaves events and shapes the role of others into our own story.

Characters intertwine and interact throughout the narrative via an intricate patterning that fulfils different genre conventions, depending on your (and the character’s) viewpoint. This serves to keep the reader guessing, trying to apply and fix conventions to characters - one minute the novel becomes a love story with intimate scenes and sentimental memories; the next it’s a mystery novel with detectives, clues and car chases.It also frequently leaps into an amused satire on the contemporary media and publishing businesses, and how they serve to frame and present an ultimate “truth”, which is actually a useful construct based on what will sell the most and what will titillate the public. This is a fairly well-worn theme, particularly when used as a plot device – but this is only a minor quibble, and certainly not one which will spoil your enjoyment of the story.

Marcus himself is likeable, intelligent, dryly witty and emotionally engaging. Reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick in the Great Gatsby and Donna Tartt’s Richard in The Secret History,  Marcus is a passionate advocate for truth and justice, for the integrity of the written word, and you care because he does. This is the heart of the novel which provides a staunch foundation on which it performs its ever growing number of spectacles and shocks – and which provides enough support to make it seamless.

Flashbacks, changing character perspectives, potential and phantom endings all feature, providing a shifting, unreliable and changing version of events. Numerous writings form a substantial part of the narrative– including drafts, reports, novel extracts, letters and transcripts – adding a veneer of authenticity and a strongly grounded sense of truth, somehow, to be found within them. This layering of the narrative explores in the same way as the plot how we create meaning and locate truth – how we shape our understanding of history from sources, and how that history is constantly reedited and transformed by each new discovery.

 There are also some fantastic twists and revelations, more than enough to please any fan of classic whodunits, and despite the breathtakingly inventive approach to plotting – which could have deterred from the sheer immersive joy of reading – the writing itself and the flow of the story is flawless and smooth enough to capture your imagination. This is a novel which captures its reader and refuses to relinquish its grip, even beyond the last page.

In fact, the only problem with this novel is that once you read it, you will urge everyone else you know to read it purely for the pleasure of discussing it with them. Which, actually, is a rather pleasant problem to have.

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