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TRUST YOUR EYES
by Linwood Barclay
Doubleday Canada, September 2012
512 pages
$22.00 CAD
ISBN: 0385669577


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Thomas Kilbride is a diagnosed schizophrenic (though some might think him more a high-functioning autistic). He spends his days and most of the nights with his gaze fixed on his three computer screens, meticulously travelling up one street and down another of the cities of the world, committing every detail he can observe to his remarkable memory. He is, he believes, on a mission for the CIA. In the foreseeable future when all paper maps have been consigned to the recycling bins, an ill-defined catastrophe will take place, eradicating all digital maps. James Joyce claimed that were Dublin to be destroyed, it could be rebuilt brick for brick and stone for stone by reference to ULYSSES. Thomas will do even more - he will be able to reconstruct the whole world and help wanderers everywhere find their way home. Happily, he is not using the latest iPhone.

Thomas has lived his whole life in his father's house. When his father dies, accidentally crushed when his lawn tractor tips over, Thomas's brother Ray comes home to see to the arrangements and to figure out what to do with Thomas. But before he can do much about this last, Thomas insists he pay attention to an odd image he has noticed while "walking" on Orchard Street in New York City - it appears that someone at a third-storey window has a plastic bag over her head and is being murdered. Thomas manages to convince Ray to drive down to New York and check it out, and though Ray believes this is yet another of his brother's delusions, like his conviction that he is a trusted asset of the CIA and that he has the ear of President Clinton, with whom he converses on a regular basis, he does. Thus he unwittingly unleashes a complex and brilliantly-plotted series of deadly events.

TRUST YOUR EYES is the sort of book about which you really do not want to know too much going in. The first word in a late chapter is "preposterous," and preposterous it is, in the very best kind of way. It is preposterous the way the film PULP FICTION was, with villainous characters who view murder as the obvious approach to any obstruction, however minor. Like the film, the book unfolds out of chronological sequence. The prologue, for example, a bravura piece, describes a virtual walk through lower Manhattan that takes place three weeks after chapter one. But unlike the film, everything in TRUST YOUR EYES is eventually revealed to make sense, if sometimes a rather loopy kind of sense. One of the delights of the book is seeing a detail dropped into an early chapter resurface much later as an essential plot element. Another is simply admiring the meticulous cleverness with which Barclay has constructed an ingenious plot, one that proceeds with all the inevitability of one of those massive domino-toppling exhibitions that are so oddly exhilarating.

TRUST YOUR EYES is fresh take on Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, but crossed, as I said before, with Quentin Tarantino. I have not read a book in some time that has provided me so much sheer fun.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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