The Man by Laura Sims: Not one, but two unreliable narrators.

I thoroughly enjoyed Laura Sims’s How Can I Help You with its increasingly unhinged librarian narrator prompting me to read The Man. Set in the 1960s, it follows Judith Stanley, an unassuming, middle-aged housewife whose formidable photographic talent is immediately apparent to her instructor when she shows her work to him after class ends. As ever with crime fiction, I’ll try not to give too much of the game away.

I moved through emptiness and filled it up with image after image; then I made my darkroom and taught myself how to process film. Before long, I was living in the middle of a rich new phase of life.   

Now that her son has left home, Judith needs an interest to keep thoughts of her past at bay, signing up for a photography class at the local community college. She’s an intensely private person, resistant to Paul’s urgings to submit her work for publication when he sees her striking sometimes disturbing images. When she was sixteen, Judith was assaulted by a stranger, a crime still unsolved. The shame engendered by the grandmother who raised her has left her unable to share her history even with her husband Tom. Developing the images with which Paul is so struck, she’s appalled to see a shadow in the self-portraits, convincing herself that her attacker has found her. When she finally unburdens herself, Tom insists she stays at home, but she can’t give up either Paul’s approbation, or the release and joy photography gives her.

He takes a long, delicious drag and when he blows it out, he thinks of how he’s building himself into a brand-new man: the man who speaks for the soon-to-be-famous Judith Stanley.

Sims begins this psychological thriller from Judith’s point of view, switching narrators halfway through. She catches the fear of a woman whose attempts to bury an horrific assault have been largely successful until she’s faced with long empty days together with the panic springing from her conviction that she’s being followed. When, around halfway through, Sims flips the narrative on its head, telling Judith’s story from Paul’s point of view, we see her subjected to another form of abuse. Sims ramps up the tension in both narratives, pulling the carpet from beneath her readers on several occasions while exploring themes of violence, misogyny and exploitation against a background of ambition and artistic expression. I enjoyed her novel but if, like me, thrillers aren’t your usual genre, I’d recommend How Can I Help You over this one.

Verve Books: Harpenden 9780857309501 288 pages Paperback (read via NetGalley)