RICHARD House’s epic novel, The Kills, defies any formal classification. Unlike most literature on the Iraq war, The Kills tells stories of characters in a place where “money rained down. Tax free. Divine.” All of them are caught in a whirlwind of corruption in unofficial projects for roads that go nowhere, or cities in a wasteland; the military, meanwhile, remains absent from the main action and the sole focus of the book remains on American and European contractors. In fact, we don’t even encounter any Iraqis.
Over 1,000 pages long, the novel comprises four loosely connected sections — or books as they are called in the novel. The digital edition comes with additional multimedia information that helps understand the characters better but is in no way essential to the main narrative.
‘Sutler,’ the first book, is the story of a man on the run. Paul Geezler, a cunning businessman working for an American hospitality organisation, promises easy money to a British contractor named Ford and sends him to a desert in Iraq on the Kuwaiti border under the fake identity of Sutler. Once there he is told to visit the local base and help in a mysterious transaction of $53 million if he wants his own share and avoid getting arrested. An explosion at the base right after the transaction forces Ford to run. Later, he is blamed for the theft and Geezler refuses to have known him.
The novel-within-a-novel structure and the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and reality make the third book, ‘The Kill,’ the most intriguing part of the novel. In the first book we are told that the American student who writes this novel goes missing before the book is published. In the second book we see two main characters watch a film based on the novel but one of them finds it too unsettling: “It wasn’t the film, so much, as the idea that people could disappear. It didn’t matter how loved they were, how vital, how dynamic. They could just vanish.” She goes on to question the representation of the real through fiction: “It wasn’t the event she doubted but how the event was demonstrated. They — the screen writers, the actors, the director, whoever — had taken something real and made it implausible.” The third book traces the murder mystery that completely sidetracks from what happens in Iraq. The Kills metafictional structure can be a little confusing: it is the story of a murder that is a reenactment of a murder from a book based on ‘reality’.
Set in Naples, ‘The Kill’ has the most complex plethora of characters. Characters come and go, people and bodies go missing or are misidentified, prostitutes and foreign students fall victim to two brothers called Mr Wolf and Mr Rabbit, human body parts are found that cannot be burned, starving dogs keep barking, and there’s so much more going on that the reader is hardly able to keep pace with House’s rich imagination.
The search for Sutler undertaken in the first book gives the reader hope for knowing the ‘truth’ but the frustrating lack of any explanation undermines the adequacy of reason, the guiding principle of traditional crime novels. Thus we find Parson, a man hired by Geezler in the first book to chase Sutler, trying to solve the mystery of his disappearance: “Parson couldn’t see how any man could so thoroughly vanish unless he was vulnerable, foolish, naïve, or halfway gone to start with. People like Sutler rarely managed to disappear unless accident or foul play played some part.”
The quest for knowledge and truth is not only doomed but parodied when crime and punishment become enmeshed. At the end of the second book Santo tells Rem (two of the men who work at the burn pits) that there is no escape or salvation for any of them: “You live with this, like we have to live with this.” Monica, the woman who sees the American student later supposed to be murdered by the two brothers in book three, says: “There isn’t any escape … there isn’t an ending. It doesn’t just stop because we are tired of it.”
Richard House not only succeeds in undoing the presumably rigid barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature but also dismantles the genric distinction held sacred by many writers and critics. Stripped of its epistemological structure, the crime thriller transforms into a schizophrenic depthlessness, in which playful multiple possibilities replace truth. “Everybody knows it’s not the embellishment that makes the story: it’s the cold hard presence of possibility,” observes Yee Jan, an American student in Naples, in the third book.
Ford, on the run, begins to confuse his real identity with that of Sutler and realises that “He missed being Sutler.” When he begins to despair he tells himself that “Sutler would return in the morning, reassess his options, adjust to the circumstances. Ford would give up, surrender to circumstance. Sutler would persist.”
When Parson tells Geezler that Sutler has started making different hotel reservations in the name of Paul Geezler, the reservations that Parson himself makes to see how Geezler will react, an endless parade of parodic performances begins that highlights the illusive nature of identity construction. The fact that Parson ends up dead by being misidentified as Sutler further destroys the distinction between the pursuer and the pursued, the detective and the criminal.
A postmodern crime novel, or an anti-detective novel, uses a frustratingly complex narrative structure that encourages the readers to solve and (psycho)analyse but at the same time denies any denouement or ending. This is exactly what Richard House is doing. In effect, The Kills is teeming with characters, both vulnerable and contriving, that briefly yet brightly shine and then fade away, leaving the readers unaware of their destinies.
The Kills
(NOVEL)
By Richard House
Picador, UK
ISBN 1447237862
1,024pp.