A Review of Araminta Hall’s “Our Kind of Cruelty”
An Incel Training Manual?
It wasn’t too long ago that a young man mowed down a group of mostly women with a van in Toronto. While the man has yet to see a proper trial, all signs point to him possibly being linked to the Incel, or Involuntarily Celibate, movement. This is a group of men who feel that women are somewhat beneath them and they don’t want to date them because they are not brutish enough — a probably simplistic definition, but you probably get the drift. Those feelings inspire murderous thoughts in some men. What does that have to do with Araminta Hall’s new thriller Our Kind of Cruelty? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. The book succeeds as a thriller because if you have an ounce of a soul in your body it will make you profoundly uncomfortable — particularly, in the book’s first two-thirds, if you’re a somewhat reasonable guy.
The novel centers around the love between two Englanders, Mike and Verity. Mike is passionately in love in Verity, but perhaps not so much that, when he moves to America for two years to climb the corporate ladder as a stock trader, he cheats on his girlfriend with a secretary. When Verity finds out, she quickly dumps Mike and moves onto another guy. However, Mike is not done with Verity. He buys an expensive home in London meant for both him and her, and even has a flower garden installed that he’s sure she will be lavished by. He follows her around the town, even wandering into the home she now, in reality, shares with her soon-to-be-new-husband while the latter share a passionate embrace. More of this stalker-ish type behaviour goes on until someone gets murdered. That’s not a spoiler, by the way. You learn that Mike is telling his tale from a prison cell on page two.
The book goes into Mike’s background as the son of an absentee dad and an alcoholic mother, who is bounced around the foster care system. We learn that Mike and Verity had a special bond, playing a game known as “the Crave” where Verity would go into a club with Mike, Mike would hang back, Verity would get picked up by another guy, Mike would step in and announce he was the boyfriend and then Mike and Verity would get aroused by this, sometimes stooping to having sex in the very club they’re frequenting. To say that Mike and Verity are a strange couple would be a very basic thing to say, indeed.
Where the book succeeds as a thriller, but may have men (and probably women) feeling squeamish, is that Our Kind of Cruelty successfully brings you into the mindset of a male sociopath. Mike is very charming and likable, which means that you don’t necessarily want to see bad things happen to him, but as his behaviour gets more and more insular and stalker-ish, the reader is pulled into his mind and starts to rationalize things in a similar way. So, yes, the book is successful in that you will be throwing the book at the wall every five minutes yelling, “Please, don’t do that Mike!” However, the scales turn about two-thirds of the way through the book, and it becomes a legal drama. The piling on of uncomfortable feelings that you may have felt during the first two-thirds of the novel largely dissipate, and in a sense Our Kind of Cruelty runs a bit out of gas.
But there is method to the author’s madness. The book is basically a screed against how the legal system doesn’t protect women — indeed, many of Verity’s actions during the first two-thirds of the read are called into question, such aswhy didn’t she call the police when Mike started coming around too much and started sending abusive e-mails? So the idea that this novel is essentially a training ground for potential Incels is kind of a moot point. There’s something deeper at work here — a call to the legal system to reform, perhaps. Still, it feels as though there are really two different books struggling to break free from this, and the shift in tone between Acts One and Two and Act Three is jarring.
So is this a good read? If you want to be outraged by how the patriarchy stacks the courts, then yes. If you want to grow uncomfortable in your own skin as Mike gradually but eventually starts crossing the line into a fantasy world of his own making, then yes. However, if you’re easily disturbed or shaken by unsettling things, you’re going to have problems here, because Our Kind of Cruelty exists to disturb. It’s hard for me to say whether or not I enjoyed this book because it’s the sort of book that I don’t think one necessarily “enjoys,” unless, of course, you’re on the slippery slope to assault and battery of the sort Mike would take on. However, that all said, Our Kind of Cruelty is successful at rattling the cage. Had a man written the first two parts of this novel, it probably wouldn’t have been published — editors would have gasped at how semi-autobiographical the narrative seemed since, even a reasonably nice guy like me has had moments of obsession over women (which I’m not proud of). I think every guy is a little like Mike now and then.
Still, for a woman able to so accurately able to paint a portrait of an abusive man while looking at the systemic injustices that such a man might face is a rare talent indeed. I have to praise Araminta Hall for being able to so accurately convey what it’s like to be abusive and what it’s like to be so oblivious to that abusiveness, while not ignoring the social backdrop that could push a man over the edge. All in all, Our Kind of Cruelty unsettles and dismantles. If you want to read a novel about obsessive love, you couldn’t pick a better book to pick up. I just hope that loutish men don’t buy this book looking for ways to justify their behaviour, because this book will do it unconsciously for them. It’s that kind of successful. Good or bad, you be the judge.
Araminta Hall’s Our Kind of Cruelty was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 8, 2018.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.
