Book Around the Corner

The Colour of Her Eyes by Conan Kennedy. (2011). Not available in French.

This one has been on the Kindle TBR for 10 years, I think. I must have downloaded it after reading Guy’s excellent review.

John Dexter first met Ruth Taylor at a school disco when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five. She was a student and he was a young professor. Ruth got pregnant at that time, John says nothing happened between them.

They meet again five years later, by chance. John is now married with two kids. They go to a café and talk. Ruth is poor and struggles to raise her daughter Sandy. John gives her money to help her start over.

They meet again five years later. They become lovers and John takes interest in Sandy, Ruth’s daughter.

Ruth and John are a case of opposites attract. He was drawn to her when she was fifteen. The colour of her eyes is of the same green as the Southdown Motor Company buses that he used to take with his parents when he was a child. They used to spend the day at Bognor Regis. Happy memories.

Something happened, we know it right away because the first chapter of the book is a police transcript of Detective Inspector Harris interrogating John Dexter. The tone of the questions is judgmental. Harris has a dirty mind and he keeps putting words in Dexter’s mouth. Harris assumes that Dexter has sexually assaulted Ruth at the disco and that Sandy is his daughter.

Right from the start, we’re in murky waters. We read the police transcripts and John sounds sincere but also very clever. Enough to manipulate Harris and step aside all the obvious traps Harris plants in his line of questioning.

DI Harris has an awful personality. He’s oldish, always dreaming about constable Phillips’s breasts, he’s racist and judgmental. A real prick. The reader understands that he’s as an unreliable narrator as John.

The novel is constructed around the police transcripts, John’s narration and Harris’s thoughts and life. The language is rather crude on Harris’s side, more polite and elaborate on John’s side. It strengthens their voices and their roles and blurs the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral.

Being in their mind is uncomfortable. John is weird and did he really fight his attraction to Ruth at that disco? Is their relationship a true love story or a sordid affair? Harris isn’t as professional as he should be and his vision of the world is narrow-minded and reactionary.

The reader tries to make their own opinion of what happened and who the protagonists are but their personalities make it hard to disentangle the true from the false. This feeling of walking on quicksand kept me reading and wondering what the truth was and where the author was taking me.

The ending blurred the lines again and there were threads in the book that bothered me a bit but I won’t say more to avoid spoilers.

Conan Kennedy also peppers his novel with thoughts about the British society as his two main characters muse about the world they live in or the EU (should I stay or should I go?). They express their distaste towards foreigners (even John’s wife, Yvette, who is Belgian), a feeling of loss of their “Englishness” and traditional values, and a general distrust of globalization. The Colour of Her Eyes was published in 2011, five years before the Brexit referendum. Maybe its outcome shouldn’t have been such a shock as it was all there already.

And ten years later, I recognize in Harris’s thinking the rank smell of the racist and retrograde arguments of some candidates at the last French presidential election. Seeing where the UK is headed, I imagine we could follow the same path. Now, that really, really scares me.

So, not-clear-cut crime fiction associated with social commentary, what’s not to like? Thanks, Guy!