Home »
Knight’s first novel a teeth grinder
Book Review
By Derryll White
Knight, Renėe (2015). Disclaimer.
This is Renėe Knight’s first novel. She is British, living in London and that is where the story is set. She has worked in TV, directing and writing film scripts, and the novel has some of that cinematic, picturesque sense to it.
Knight opens with a subtle image; a self-published book being read by one of her central characters, Catherine Ravenscroft. The disclaimer in the frontispiece, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead…” has a thin red line through it. What a clever plot tool. I have read thousands of books and never encountered anything like this. The book, self-published, totally upsets Catherine’s life. ‘The Perfect Stranger’ (the book within the book) opens an old world of supressed memory. Meanwhile Stephen Brigstocke, widower and failed writer and teacher, years after her death finds an old photo envelope in his wife’s things. The contents issue him into a world of doubt and disclaimers. How does anyone know of the secret lives that may lie behind trust?
What is the life cycle of a secret? Have you ever thought about that? Some disappear with time while others fester and take on lives of their own. How does memory work? Renėe Knight’s novel is touted as a suspense thriller, but she pushes deeper into the psyche than that fascile categorization usually permits. Memory – perhaps the ultimate destroyer.
Perhaps the real question here is when does a secret morph into lies? Is it inevitable that one has to construct a world to manage the secret? And what does that construct steal from its creator – energy, honesty, love? Renėe Knight has it all going on in ‘Disclaimer,’ lie upon lie upon destruction of character and any possibility of happiness. Knight uses this to let minor characters, such as Simon the rival documentary producer, shine as scumbags feeding on Catherine’s terror. Knight has the ability to catch character traits that have me grinding my teeth as I read – unmitigated bastards!
‘Disclaimer’ is well-written, strong in spots. My problems with it came at the end. I would be interested to hear from other readers. Can anyone go through what Catherine Ravenscroft put herself through, and remain a balanced, functioning human being? I wonder.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
DISTRUST – The whole experience left me with the sensation that I had reached down into a blocked drain and was groping around in the sewage trying to clean it. But there was nothing solid to get hold of. All I felt was soft filth, and it got into my skin and under my fingernails, and its stink invaded my nostrils, clinging to the hairs, soaking up into the tiny blood vessels and polluting my entire system.
MARRIAGE – I took those notebooks home with me and read and reread them, finding much to comfort me. I am grateful she’d kept them. Like the photographs, they are pieces of a puzzle. I have sucked up every word in them; I have tasted the ink on their pages; I take them to bed with me and sleep with them under my pillow, dreaming the words swim off the page into my head and Nancy’s most private thoughts are absorbed into mine. I have eaten those pages and swallowed them down. She is in me now, my darling girl. Now we are one. She has given me strength: the outside world can’t touch me, but I can touch it whenever I choose.
INVENTION – …she used her imagination: it’s what writers do. She played around with some of the facts – I doubt very much whether Jonathan would have been interested in pursuing Orwell, Bowles or Kerouac. Wishful thinking? Artistic license. Of course she changed names. To protect the innocent? Perhaps I should have changed them back again. It was a work of fiction, but still, I like to believe that it released the truth from its ballast, it allowed it to float up to the surface. It’s the substance of a story which is important, after all.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
