The Party

Ugh, how do I unread a book? All praise to the author for crafting such a gripping story, but now I would like to pour bleach into my eyes and set fire to my Kindle. What a detestable character - and for once, I don't mean the middle class Rosamunde Pilcher rejects, but the deeply unreliable and itchingly unlikeable narrator. I haven't been so repulsed since catching a stray half hour of American Psycho. Creepy creepy creepy. But the four stars remain, for the author's great observational skill and deftly-woven plotting, not to mention creating a character with such a powerful but negative effect.

With The Party, Elizabeth Day seems to tell the usual tale of the troubled hanger-on and the privileged and entitled (and titled) wealthy class, but she complicates it in the end in ways that I found quite thrilling.

Martin Gilmour is that hanger-on whose character was damaged by the emotional as well as economic poverty of his childhood. It’s possible his mother loved him, she certainly sacrificed to send him to the best schools she could afford and sought out opportunities for him, but he did not feel her love and she fed his self-loathing. A scholarship student with poor social skills, he found his sustenance in the friendship of Ben Fitzmaurice, one of those privileged scions of wealth and pedigree for whom everything comes easily show more and whose family welcomed him.

Lucy is his long-suffering wife who sees him more clearly than he thinks and loves him anyway. She is the most misunderstood of the characters in The Party . Everyone thinks she is weak and frumpy when really, she is wearing protective cover and choosing Martin because he does not ask too much of her. She is not weak, she is recovering from trauma.

Of course, there are also Ben and Serena, two boring plastic people whose narrative we are blessedly spared. Some might think Martin is sociopathic because he deliberately sought out Ben’s friendship and thanks to a cruel act as a child, killing a wounded bird the school was rescuing. Martin himself seems to think he’s quite a nasty piece of work and never pretends to be a good guy, he carefully inculpates himself in a sustained strategic campaign for Ben’s friendship.

The story opens at the local police station where Martin is being questioned. The narrative skips from there to Martin telling his backstory with Ben and Lucy sharing her experiences at an in-patient mental treatment facility. We surmise something happened at the party…and in time we learn what it was, but first we also learn how much Martin has sacrificed for Ben, how he has been rewarded and how thoroughly despicable Ben and Serena can be in their narcissistic obliviousness to others.

It’s risky writing a story with unsympathetic characters, but Elizabeth Day succeeds. In fact, by the end, I was thoroughly in sympathy with Martin and Lucy. The truth is revealed slowly and the party incident resolves itself, becoming much less than it seems at first, but it’s a great pretext for unwinding this friendship that has so despoiled Martin’s life even though he thought it was his great good fortune.

The ending with the cat also made me wonder how much of Martin’s bad character was a result of expectations and once freed from his mother’s opinion, Ben’s opinion, and his own obsessive love for Ben, he was able to find his more humane self. It makes me wonder about his recitation of killing Sammy the bird, while he ascribes his act to jealousy, there are hints that it could have been disgust with prolonging the suffering of a wounded bird – which at first light seems like rank self-justification, but later, when all is said and done and Martin stops living down to everyone’s low expectations, maybe it could be true.

And yes, Martin does a terrible thing, but it was unconsidered, an act of loving generosity to a friend who could never understand that kind of sacrifice and who misunderstood it from the beginning as opportunistic and grasping.

That’s why The Party works so well. There’s the question of how much Martin’s narrative is colored by his own self-loathing which for most of his life he has masked with intellectual arrogance. The story leaves us wondering…long after the last sentence is read and that makes it a good book.

The Party will be released August 15th. I received an e-galley from the publishers through NetGalley.

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Starting with an interview in a police station, the reason for which is not revealed until late in the novel, this is a gripping exploration of the psychological dependency of Martin Gilmour upon his childhood school friend Ben Fitzmaurice. Their back story is gradually revealed , pieced together through the interview, Martin’s own memories and also the diary of his wife Lucy.
Elizabeth Day’s expressive writing delves deep into the feelings of Martin and strips bare his weaknesses as well as finally revealing the reasons for the police interview. The tone of the book is such that the voices of Martin and Lucy give distinct versions of the events and make for a compelling novel.

A tale of hangers on, sycophancy and unrequited love. Martin knows his life will change the moment he steps on the train en route to boarding school. He's right, it does when he meets the charismatic Ben who is everything he is not with his privileged background. Interspersed with the past there's a police interview after an incident at a party at Ben's home. This was a great story, told well despite the characters being very unlikeable - all of them. Some might have looked nice on the outside but inside, where it matters, they were really very ugly. Wealthy and privileged they might be, but nice? - not at all, with their sense of self entitlement. This book is dark and comical in turns and I enjoyed every single page!

3.5* rounded down - I was intending to round up, but then the last chapter was just so boring that I changed my mind.

This is one of those novels where something meriting a police investigation has occurred, but what exactly it was is revealed very gradually and in dribs and drabs. Here that is exacerbated further by the fact that there is a second earlier "something" of terrible import which occurred, and which also needs to be heavily foreshadowed and then disclosed.

Ben and Martin met at boarding school and Martin attached himself to Ben and has clung on ever since, but there is something off about their relationship. Things have come to a head at Ben's 40th birthday party.

I round this very readable, although there were no likeable show more characters and no one really to identify with. Both Martin and Lucy had spent their lives moulding their personalities to suit those they loved, which made for an unsettling read; Lucy was particularly opaque. An interesting read, but one without a heart and certainly no joy. show less

Een aardige pageturner die in de verte doet denken aan de boeken van Donna Tartt. Wel mooi dat de hoofdpersoon autistisch is maar dat dat nergens met zoveel woorden wordt gezegd. Het is een verhaal over twee 'vrienden' in een ongelijke verhouding. Ze delen een geheim, maar dat zet de vriendschap al snel onder druk. Tijdens het feest loopt een en ander uit de hand.

Fascinating read. Class friction, gender friction, masculin power. And the fact that the truth will come out one day.