I’ve just got back from a much-needed holiday, before taking off for another – still needed! – trip. All serving both to clear my head before I dive into exams and to get me reading lots again, after wading through a massive non-fiction tome recently. But more on that another time, I feel.

I finished a book way back in July which I still haven’t written about, and it’s partly because I was unsure what to write or how to approach a discussion of it. This uncertainty stemmed partly from a reading slump (which I appear to have passed on to Fliss, sorry!) but also because it was a very unusual book for me to read. One might say… unexpected.

The short, fairly unexciting, story behind this is that my sister bought me a copy of The Exception by Christian Jungersen, which is probably best described as a ‘psychological thriller’. I haven’t read anything that could be termed a thriller in so long – because I’m far too excitable and jumpy to read thrillers generally – that I really wasn’t sure how to approach it.

I enjoyed it! I can’t compare it to other novels of its type, but while it wasn’t perfect in its execution, it was a really interesting approach. Basically it focuses on four women, who work at an institution for genocide studies in Denmark. The story is told from the voices of the four women, in turn. What at first seems like a case of fairly simple office politics takes on a more disturbing angle as we begin to hear events from different perspectives. Various unpleasant messages are received and events take place, but nobody is sure whether the culprit is internal, external, or both. It’s not really a book of action so much as of analysing people’s characters, past and actions, and realising how these can be interpreted and reinterpreted based on the other characters wishes, preconceptions and prejudices.

What’s interesting about it, then, from this respect is that not only is it a book which has an ‘unreliable narrator’: it has four. Which, naturally, draws the reader into making their own judgements and analyses alongside those of the characters in the novel, which in itself feels quite disturbing. At the beginning, they each individually seem quite credible, but more and more doubts seep in. Another aspect is that, as they are geared towards the analysis and research of genocide, including the psychology of those involved in genocide both as those who support without controlling event (think of Nazi soldiers) and those who individually have an impact upon events and are a direct cause of atrocities (such as various war criminals) and the whole array of individuals in between, that kind of research is then brought to bear – however inappropriately – upon the people around them, as a way of understanding events.

It does keep you going with it, whether you like it or not, and explores characters who can act in both humane and cruel ways without necessarily noting any contradiction in their behaviour.

One of the interesting points about the book, from a ‘gender’ angle, is that while it’s fairly usual as a reader to come across book after book in which male characters and their motivations are at centre stage, with weak female supporting characters sometimes serving little purpose other than as a means by which the male protagonists can exercise their own autonomy, it’s less usual to find it the other way round. Often you find that even where a book has a female protagonist, the actions and inner workings of the key male characters are quite fully explored; their character development isn’t neglected. With The Exception, there are only a couple of male characters and while they play key roles in terms of the plot, it’s more in the sense that they provide particular motivations. As characters, they’re almost completely undeveloped and rarely discussed except in this incidental way. It was an interesting thing to note. So much of the written word has been given over to analysing the behaviour and inner workings of various male minds, that it was almost a shock to the system to have very peripheral male characters. I don’t, in the context, think it was necessarily a failing in the book; in fact, it enhanced it in a few respects, although I don’t want to give spoilers. Suffice to say that it highlighted perhaps that the actual identities of the men involved was pretty incidental to the action: catalysts but never actors, with the main psychological action all centred around the workplace and the interaction between the women.

Just a few thoughts! It was definitely something that was quite unusual for me, and it reminded me that I used to read a fair bit of ‘crime fiction’. Labelling books in various ways often does seem a bit arbitrary, but there is some excellent fiction out there which has a mystery or crime at the centre but I suppose that when most people think of ‘mystery’ or ‘crime’ books, quality is not the first item that comes to mind. I’ve always liked good books, and sometimes separating it out into all these genres does (some!) books a disservice. I tend to browse ‘general fiction’ in bookshops, but very rarely look at crime fiction to sift the quality from the chaff and consequently have read less and less over the years, just because I’m not looking specifically for something that has a crime in it, just a good book.

So, yes, I should probably take more time to seek out different kinds of books. Sometimes it’s good when you get given a book that you wouldn’t have found for yourself, but end up enjoying; and who knows, maybe it can change your book buying habits in the future?

Has anybody else been branching out, recently?

This book counts towards the Chunkster Challenge, being a tasty 576 pages long! Nearly there!