Disclaimer

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft has enjoyed a stellar career as a journalist despite having a long break to raise her son. Receiving one award after another, the last thing she expects to see on her desk is a novel she has no memory of buying and discovering upon reading it that it is all about her and a secret she has been harboring from that time two decades ago when the family went on vacation at a beach in Spain. Later on she finds out that she is not the sole recipient of the book. Her son Nicholas and, eventually, her supportive husband Robert also receive their respective copies. Soon the family is subjected to stalking by an old man named Stephen Brigstocke, who has an axe to grind with Catherine, blaming her for the doomed fate of his son Jonathan who met his death in an accident and figured in her past.

I was about to give Disclaimer four stars. It felt a bit formulaic that halfway through the novel I already figured out what happened in Spain that sets the plot of this narrative in motion. Or so it seemed until the last 50 pages when the author goes on overdrive with an alternative perspective. Suddenly, the hero is no longer the hero. The villain is no longer the villain. In short, I completely fell for the red herrings that she served to me on a silver platter. That bitch. That bitch who wrote a novel so intriguing that Alfonso Cuaron and Cate Blanchett decided to collaborate on a small-screen adaptation they’re releasing on AppleTV in two weeks.

I guess the five stars are well-earned for the thrilling ride, even though that can easily decrease if based solely on technicalities. The novel is easy to read, with 50+ chapters, each just a few pages long, which is highly compatible with people’s ever shorter attention spans nowadays. Revelations are dropped nonchalantly, as if lacking the oomph or the cinematic equivalent characterized by shrieking violins that make the reveal more thrilling. What Disclaimer lacks in that area, it makes up for in the way Renée Knight writes her characters, making them likeable when they shouldn’t be; atrocious even if they somehow don’t deserve it.

The novel within a novel trick has already been done ad nauseam in literary history but it’s really how you utilize it to conceal facts and lead your readers astray that really matters. In this regard, the author employs the gimmick effectively. It also makes you wonder, after finishing the novel, how you fell for it. The narration of events we force ourselves to believe, for convenience’s sake, is an imagined account of a grieving mother who wasn’t even there to witness what really occurred. In the end, we really are Robert Ravenscroft here, gullible and easily fooled by rage bait or whatever equivalent it has in the literary world.

As for structure, the short chapters initially alternate between the points of view of Stephen Brigstocke and Catherine Ravenscroft. Alternative perspectives, mostly from Robert and Nicholas, are presented later, welcome diversions from the two predominant voices that lord over the storyline. We also get some glimpses of the actual novel within the novel entitled The Perfect Stranger, in Italics, but just in a chapter or two. I am not sure whether this novel would’ve been more interesting had it been written like Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, with much of the novel within the novel running parallel with the main plot.

Overall, this is a decent first novel. Renée Knight used to work for the BBC, so she has an air of authority over her journalist characters and their experiences somehow. Disclaimer is engrossing and what keeps you hooked is the quest for truth, all while you are given enough room to doubt the characters and their motivations, allowing the author to play around with your judgment and surprising you in the end with the realization that most often than not the truth is utilitarian and can be bent to serve whatever belief system a person already holds dear and no longer wants to change no matter what.

In a world based on he-said/she-said, who can you really trust?