Rhys Thomas - The Suicide Club
Rhys Thomas’s book slips neatly into the angsty affluent youth genre that has been milked to so much success on Donna Tartt’s A Secret History, and shares some of that books success and much of its failings.
Our protagonist Richie is a typical teenager, concerned with girls, his reputation and his parents and they constantly seek to complicate his life which had only previously been troubled by the late delivery of the new My Chemical Romance album. However he has a deeper side as well, witnessed in the first few pages of the book, where he visualises ‘Worst Case Scenarios’ for those he knows, putting seemingly meaningless actions into a frame of dramatic awfulness. This has come from a mysterious past of manic and violent actions, that may or may not return.
At the same time an effervescent new student ‘Freddie’ has started at school, and after saving a depressed loner from suicide becomes something of a cult leader to Richie and his peers.
After sermonising on the emptiness of adult life and the romanticism of youth Freddie convinces Rich to assist him in the kidnap and murder of the school mascot – a bird called Bertie – with the implications leading to a fall out of suicide pacts, bullying and bloodshed. Unfortunately, after a promising start of very readable narrative, clever asides and teenage cultural references, this is where the book loses its way.
As an account of the trials of adolescent life Thomas’s book is written with some style and his characters are suitably melodramatic, insecure and amusing in equal measure, but as suicidal fundamentalists they are simply not believable. The catalogue of events – killing a bird, trouble with headmasters and trauma at the Christmas disco – just do not fit with the macabre events that surround it. I know that this is the point to an extent – that teenagers overact, that they are idealistic and do stupid things – but at no point do we feel that this is a book about characters who want to die, and the more this takes over the narrative, the less we care. The fact is that this is too big a theme to just be a force in the narrative – the characters must react to it instead of keeping it as an inner fantasy – it must take over the narrative rather than just be implicit within it. Its a bit like writing a story about a pizza delivery boy in New York, and oh yes and it happens to be 9/11/2001 but that’s not really important. Either this is a book about teenage relationships or teenage suicide, but it cannot be both separately at the same time.
The reason Donna Tartt’s book works is because the conceit behind the suicide pact – the Greek Tragedy club – was original and very well contrived, and so could flit in and out of the novel as it pleased, but here the pact is an add-on – it is mentioned and die keep reading because we think we might find out more, but these characters, the catalyst for all that happens, just does not return in the same way. Why does one feel that more modern novels are featuring the climax in the very first act, and if they are going to treat their readers like the impatient individuals with no attention spans, then surely they should have characters who act in the same way? The Secret History and The Suicide Club are both books about young adults in the technological age, and while the Tartt takes great pains to tell us that hers are a group of aloof freaks, Thomas’s gang seem the same as any other teenager. The thought then, that they should let their actions be dominated by the musings of one young man on one drunken night who decides not to mention anything again for another few weeks and then disappears for ages, seems unlikely to say the least. Haven’t they got the new My Chemical Romance album to look forward to?
Our protagonist Richie is a typical teenager, concerned with girls, his reputation and his parents and they constantly seek to complicate his life which had only previously been troubled by the late delivery of the new My Chemical Romance album. However he has a deeper side as well, witnessed in the first few pages of the book, where he visualises ‘Worst Case Scenarios’ for those he knows, putting seemingly meaningless actions into a frame of dramatic awfulness. This has come from a mysterious past of manic and violent actions, that may or may not return.
At the same time an effervescent new student ‘Freddie’ has started at school, and after saving a depressed loner from suicide becomes something of a cult leader to Richie and his peers.
After sermonising on the emptiness of adult life and the romanticism of youth Freddie convinces Rich to assist him in the kidnap and murder of the school mascot – a bird called Bertie – with the implications leading to a fall out of suicide pacts, bullying and bloodshed. Unfortunately, after a promising start of very readable narrative, clever asides and teenage cultural references, this is where the book loses its way.
As an account of the trials of adolescent life Thomas’s book is written with some style and his characters are suitably melodramatic, insecure and amusing in equal measure, but as suicidal fundamentalists they are simply not believable. The catalogue of events – killing a bird, trouble with headmasters and trauma at the Christmas disco – just do not fit with the macabre events that surround it. I know that this is the point to an extent – that teenagers overact, that they are idealistic and do stupid things – but at no point do we feel that this is a book about characters who want to die, and the more this takes over the narrative, the less we care. The fact is that this is too big a theme to just be a force in the narrative – the characters must react to it instead of keeping it as an inner fantasy – it must take over the narrative rather than just be implicit within it. Its a bit like writing a story about a pizza delivery boy in New York, and oh yes and it happens to be 9/11/2001 but that’s not really important. Either this is a book about teenage relationships or teenage suicide, but it cannot be both separately at the same time.
The reason Donna Tartt’s book works is because the conceit behind the suicide pact – the Greek Tragedy club – was original and very well contrived, and so could flit in and out of the novel as it pleased, but here the pact is an add-on – it is mentioned and die keep reading because we think we might find out more, but these characters, the catalyst for all that happens, just does not return in the same way. Why does one feel that more modern novels are featuring the climax in the very first act, and if they are going to treat their readers like the impatient individuals with no attention spans, then surely they should have characters who act in the same way? The Secret History and The Suicide Club are both books about young adults in the technological age, and while the Tartt takes great pains to tell us that hers are a group of aloof freaks, Thomas’s gang seem the same as any other teenager. The thought then, that they should let their actions be dominated by the musings of one young man on one drunken night who decides not to mention anything again for another few weeks and then disappears for ages, seems unlikely to say the least. Haven’t they got the new My Chemical Romance album to look forward to?
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