BOOK REVIEW: CARLY RHEILAN'S "A CAT'S CRADLE"

Such is the currency of secrets, and the alliances they forge.

This is the most discomfiting novel I have ever read. It was disturbing, unsettling, haunting. It went to the very darkest places of human experience, and nudged me along with it. I use the word specifically. It did not push, did not demand: it invited me along, quietly dared me to join it, the experience being all the more rattling because once I started along, I felt I could not stop even though at times, I wished to.

Is A CAT'S CRADLE a great novel? You're damned right it is. But the greatness is multidimensional. It's great in the technical sense, being extremely well-written, but it's also great in the sense of its profundity, what it has to say about life, about childhood, about class, about sexual predation and the almost unending ripple-effect it has upon its victims and all of those around them. And beyond this, it is great because it is fearless. This is a subject which most sexual assault survivors could not bear to discuss even from their own perspective; but to fracture the narrative in the way Carly did, to provide the points of view not merely of the victim, but the offender, would be a bridge too far for almost anyone else.

Let's be blunt. A CAT'S CRADLE is about the "relationship" which forms between a convicted child murderer and pedophile named Ralph Sneddon, and his latest victim, nine year-old Mary Crouch. It does not go into disgusting detail, except to the extent that the subject matter is in itself morally disgusting, but in the same vein, it pulls no punches about the way sexual predators think and operate...or the way a little girl, herself so pre-pubescent she does not understand what is happening to her (or rather creatively misunderstands it), would react to her own exploitation and violation. As an advocate for victims of crime myself, I found our heroine's reaction uncomfortably honest, as indeed, the entire novel is uncomfortably honest: it explains that these relationships, twisted and evil as they are, are just that: relationships. They trade on the naivete of the victim, and on a child's natural love of secret-keeping, of living a life within a life which is known only to them. Mary is sometimes disgusted and horrified by Ralph, but she develops a love for him, too; almost a need, because of the lavishness of his nonsexual attentions, his ability to construct a "safe place" for her which is, of course, about as safe as hell on a bad day, and his predatory ability to foster emotional dependence. And here's where we hit my own personal discomfort zone dead center: in my professional experience, most abusive relationships of any kind are co-dependent and partially enabled by the victim, which is one of those topics nobody outside the field ever wants to discuss: but when it comes to a child, who cannot consent by definition, the waters, though murky and scummed-over by the perpetrator's vile intent, are still clear enough to understand. Mary is being maniuplated, but as with most manipulation there evolves (mutates?) a degree of willingness to be manipulated. Nobody I've ever read, and I love to read, has ever had the pitiless honesty to discuss this phenomenon with such scouring honesty. And indeed, since this "work of fiction" is in fact fictionalized autobiography, and Mary Crouch merely Carly Rheilan by another name, it's a doubly impressive achievement. But damn is it disturbing. Having read Rheilan's previous novel, ASYLUM, I had high expectations of the intellectual and moral depth of the story, but this work quite exceeded them, especially in its depiction of Ralph. Rheilan again exhibits "the touch" here, the ability to lay bare the innermost workings of a villain's mind, and even make him understandable by his own hellish lights. In ASLYUM the brief glimpses we get of the villain, a human trafficker called Christmas, are masterful: he's a Monster Compleat, but fascinating. Her examination of Ralph goes much deeper. We are forced into intimacy with this man and shown the naked horror of his own inner landscape -- what drives him, how he tries to resist those drives, and how he justifies his actions (including murder and animal murder) when the drives prove too strong. We see his techniques for grooming, the lies he tells himself as to his own motives, and the way he, as a convicted but paroled child-murderer with no friends or family beyond an invalid embittered mother who hates his guts, flits through the area in which he grew up like a ghost...or more specifically a poltergeist. We never pity Ralph -- his crimes are beyond pity -- but he is presented so realistically, and with such richness and complexity, that we are forced to realize the "monster" label we always use in these situations is unwarranted, because cowardly. By calling Ralph -- or Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot -- a "monster," we let humanity off the hook for producing them in the first place. If A CAT'S CRADLE has an object lesson, it is that there are no monsters. There are only human beings who make monstrous choices, take monstrous actions, do monstrous damage. And somehow that makes everything worse. Ralph is not a monster, he is merely evil. And evil is always "merely." It is always prosaic, empty, even a little boring. Evil is the concentration camp guard who is kind to his dog and waters his begonias and kisses his wife before he goes to work. Evil is next door. Evil is us.

I should close by noting CRADLE is a period piece, being set in 1962, and profoundly English, in that social class and the nature of country village life take prominent places in the narrative, almost to the point of being characters themselves, though they are never extrude into the story. It is also a fascinating examination of childhood, not only in terms of how children think and behave, but how they see the world, which is curiously earthy and intimate and realistic on the one hand (because they are literally closer to the ground, and see things from unusual angles), but on the other, through a lens of pure ignorance and imagination. Children drift a blurry line between the world as it is, which is full of rules they don't understand and truths their parents and society work sweatily to prevent them from understanding "too soon"...and the imaginary world full of misunderstandings and dreams and fancies which they use to fill in those gaps, which can lead to outcomes both comedic and tragic. (Stephen King examined this brilliantly in IT, but from a very different perspective.)

So there it is. One of the best novels I've read in the last decade, and the most disturbing novel I've ever read. A profound work, but not for the faint of heart.