Written by Alex Michaelides

“As a writer, I am habitually prone to fleeing reality. To making things up and telling stories.”

So says the unreliable narrator in The Fury, Alex Michaelides new novel. It’s a murder mystery, whose reality keeps changing until the reader doesn’t know what to believe. We are constantly being told that what we just read is untrue, so it’s a little hard to keep your bearings as a reader, all part of this narrator’s scheme.

This novel is about a reclusive movie star and her friends whose trip to a private Greek island named Aura is colored by murder. Who-dun-it? Or more accurately, Why-dun-it? The facts keep changing as we realize that the narrator is not to be trusted.

The narrator promises to tell the truth, but we soon learn that what we are reading is filtered through a warped mind. “When I first began writing this account, I promised you I would tell only the truth. But the thing is, looking back over what I have written, it occurs to me that I may have misled you over a few points, here and there.”

We get so many versions of the truth from our very unreliable source, it’s impossible to know which one is correct. “But you can think what you like—” he says, “that’s the fun of a murder mystery, isn’t it? You can bet on whatever horse you choose.”

Despite Heracleitus’s refrain that “Character is destiny,” or “Character is fate,” as our narrator says, none of the characters in the novel is too appealing. In fact, they are all rather reproachable in individual ways, so I had a hard time loving this book, despite its clever way of revealing information, then taking it away. To my mind, The Fury doesn’t hold a candle to Michaelides first two books, The Silent Patient and Mermaids.