The Maidens - Alex Michaelides
What an annoying book. Had I not DNFd the two books I read before this I think I would have given up on it, but I didn't want to make it three in a row. This review is going to contain spoilers, so be warned.
The Maidens opens with the following passage:
Edward Fosca was a murdered.
This was a face. This wasn't something Mariana knew just on an intellectual level, as an idea. Her body knew it. She felt it in her bones, along her blood, and deep within every cell.
Edward Fosca was guilty.
And yet - she couldn't prove it, and might never prove it. This man, this monster, who had killed at least two people, might, in all likelihood, walk free.
This is the opening of the Prologue, which ends with Mariana vowing to go back over everything that happened to find a way to prove Fosca' guilt. The rest of the book recounts the events, with the promise that at the end we'll know what Mariana knows. We're looking for the truth, and the entire novel happens under the shadow of this promise.
The truth, as it turns out, is that Fosca isn't and never was a murderer. The real killer is Mariana's niece, Zoe, who is carrying out a plan hatched - for reasons that are never explored - by Mariana's late husband Sebastian, with whom Zoe was having an affair.
This is a novel populated by characters who exist purely to be red herrings: Henry, one of Mariana's patients, a violent stalker who haunts the first half of the book only to be abruptly arrested and sectioned in a sequence that lasts for about half a page and is never mentioned again; Fred, a creepy stalker who harasses Mariana on a train and pressures her into going on several dates with him, who she develops feelings for by the end of the novel; and Fosca himself, a Classics tutor with a deeply problematic relationship with his female students - sexual predator, yes, but not the killer Mariana insists he is. Perhaps all this serves to show us that Mariana is an untrustworthy narrator, but if that's the case then it seems to simply render the whole narrative pointless. And if she's untrustworthy, why would she show us the events as they presumably happened - i.e. her niece being the killer - and not as she wants us to believe they happened, with Fosca as the culprit?
This weirdness over Marianan's viewpoint and her strange decisions - not least of all her relationship with stalker and self-professed psychic Fred - reflects a wider problem with the book, namely that nearly all of its female characters are presented in a way that feels deeply misogynistic. They're irrational, driven by wildly uncontrolled emotion and intuition that is constantly proved to be wrong, presented as easily manipulated and as believing themselves to be much smarter than they actually are - our narrator included - and quick to become spellbound by completely mediocre, often manipulative and deeply creepy men. One character, a cleaner named Eloise who draws her eyebrows on badly and speaks almost entirely in the third person - is portrayed in a way that isn't just misogynistic but betrays a distaste for the working classes that seems to come from the author himself rather than the elitism of the setting.
It's probably clear that I'm not entirely sure what the point of this was. If this were a classic whodunnit then the reveal of the killer's true identity would work fairly well, though the very flimsy explanation for the motive would still be frustrating. As it is, though, it's undermined by the book's initial framing of itself as a howdunnit (or perhaps a 'howcatchem'). The reveal simply betrays the promise of the book rather than delivering a satisfying denouement. If this is instead an attempt at an unreliable narrator then it simply doesn't work, for reasons I've gone into above.
There were moments here when I was enjoying the ride, but ultimately it's just not worth it and the problems outweigh the scarce good moments far too much. Not recommended.