The Long and Short of It: The Kills
Book: The Kills by Richard House
Format: Hardback (Courtesy city of Melville Library)
I would be lying if I said I was excited to read this
particular book. The Kills is a 1000+ page novel about American contractors
operating out of post-war Iraq, consisting of four separate novels as well as
interactive content if you happen to be reading the book on a tablet or kindle
etc. The four novels are: Sutler, The
Massive, The Kill and The Hit. Sutler is
the codename of the character introduced in the first pages, who has already
been given a new identity but reverts to his old name after he is set up to
take the fall for the embezzlement of large amounts of money from a contracting
company. He takes off across the desert
with a professional hitman on his tail, and the overarching figure of his boss,
a man named Paul Geezler. The Massive is
the name given to a project that does not officially exist, and this the
project being worked on at the time of the embezzlement. These stories by all accounts are somehow
linked. I would not know. I never got that far.
This book is intelligent, well-paced and written with a
tight control on language. So why didn’t
I finish it?
To begin with, the subject matter lies well outside my areas
of knowledge and interest. While one of
the joys of reading is exploring exactly those, there is a certain point at
which the brain just disengages. When
reading becomes a chore, it is time to switch books, and for this reason, I
gave up after fifty pages.
Add onto that the fact that this is novel which speaks in a
shorthand belonging to that particular area of interest. There are business and military terms galore
in The Kills and nary an index in sight. All the characters (so far male) refer to
each other by their surnames, and seem largely indistinguishable in their
personalities and roles. In short, I was
not drawn to the world nor the characters it was peopled with.
One thing that did interest me was the subject matter I had
read would be in the third book, ‘The
Kill’. Apparently if I had gotten
that far, I would have been able to read about the book within the book, a
novel about a bizarre campus murder which is gaining popularity throughout the
novel, and is later mimicked in real life.
The point at which I stopped reading, this novel had already been
mentioned by a young man Sutler sits with on a bus. But the military and thriller aspect? Arguably the whole centrepoint of the
novel? Really, 100% not for me.
And truly, life is too short to force yourself to read 1000+
page novels you are just not into.
If you want to read a review by someone who did like the
book, here’s one from the Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/23/the-kills-richard-house-review