Ink Ribbon Red

My memory of Eight Detectives is that I was a bit disappointed by it, but when I spotted this book by the same author on the library shelf I went back and had a look at what I’d written at the time. I found I’d actually said it was really good in the end but the mystery was too loaded towards the end of the book, and I’d said I’d try the author again. So that was enough to make me check out the book and take it home. Where I got completely absorbed by it and read it in a few days. I’m definitely glad I picked it up!

Like Eight Detectives this story has a good setup and it made a difference that I was willing to trust that Pavesi could deliver on it’s promise. A group of university friends are getting together to celebrate a thirtieth birthday and they play a game where they write short stories in which one member of the group kills another member of the group. These stories are then inserted into the “real” story of their birthday weekend, which isn’t told entirely in chronological order and also includes various flashbacks to events in the weeks preceding the get-together. It’s very much a case of the unreliable narrator on steroids and it definitely felt like it could have been a complete disaster and a tangled mess of a book. But it all manages to work out and I left the book happy, and it’s very clear in the end what is fiction and what isn’t.

The tangle is part of what makes it so readable: did that chapter you just read really happen or was it a figment of one of the character’s imagination? Did it fit into a pattern by accident or by design? The book definitely has “just one more chapter” appeal.

I’m not really sure why the author set the book in 1999, making the characters just a couple of years older than me. I think it may have been wanting to remove mobile phones and reliable internet connections, more or less, from the equation, though I actually think more of the characters would have had them by then. And also it makes the typewriters used to write the stories slightly less anachronistic. But I’m picking at holes that aren’t really there. I liked the disparate group of friends and, in the midst of a very fantastical book, there was a lot of realism to their relationships and their life paths diverging after university seemed realistic.

Overall though I’m glad that six-year-ago-me wrote down that she’d give the author another chance and trust him that time. I very much hope the author’s got some more wild ideas for future books.