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A review by miller8d
The Singer's Gun by John Emily, Emily St. John Mandel
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
First book I read on my kindle! I highlighted my favorite bits. I read this book in one single day and very much enjoyed every plot twist, so the 3.0 rating is absolutely not an insult (In my head right now, 4.0 is basically a perfect rating because I want to reserve a higher rating for a book that might change my entire life lol), it’s just that Emily St. John Mandel is my favorite author right now, and this book was less life-changing than her others, perhaps because it takes place in the normal nonfictional Earth, which is also why The Lola Quarter wasn’t life-changing either, but these are both novels she wrote circa 2010, and I’m excited that her writing only seem to get better and better. One frustrating complaint I do have about this book, though, is that characters were almost never described. I am someone who needs at least a vague visual concept in order to imagine a character, but mentioning hair color or clothing was the extent to which Mandel EVER described the main characters in this book. She went into detail about the Russian waitress toward the end, which gave me a perfect mental image that I wish I’d had all along; she described the bitchy supervisor in the office which gave me a perfect mental image; and every single other person was a frustrating blur. Mandel does this incredibly well in her more recent novels, though.
As for the plot of this book, I really liked that so many moments were so humiliating and gut-wrenching; the exhausting walk to the party where she humiliated herself and then found the nude art book; the sobbing while stealing the cat; the telling his fiancé that he wanted to part ways on their honeymoon; the parents approving the blackmail; his speechlessness when Gary mentions that Aria’s an obvious thief; Aria’s contempt and condescending attitude toward Anton which eventually culminates in her becoming his killer; the embarrassing desperation with which he took interest in the singer; I could go on, everything was embarrassing and I felt it very viscerally.
As always, Mandel does an incredible service to the world by explaining how so much evil could exist in our good world: by crafting intimate portraits of bad people who are not fundamentally bad, of people whose own wounds and circumstances and desperation lead them to make choices that hurt other people. I think many people must also move through life with a desperately angry confusion about how and why so many people can be so cruel and selfish out there, and reading Mandel’s books reminds me that the seed of life is good, and that cruelty is not born in a vacuum, it is spawned from that same seed that was spawned from a good fruit, given some circumstance of mutation, of terrible weather, of trampling footsteps, of fungus or infection. I believe that this is the only explanation for the evil in the world— all evil is simply confusion, even to a dire extent, it’s bone-deep, soul-deep, atom-deep confusion. Mandel helps me remember that. At its core, this book was about failing to stand all the way up for what’s right against immense pressure to do what’s wrong from the people you love, and consequently, destroying other lives. In other words, it’s about the abstract nature of a forced choice between ruining your current live, or POSSIBLY ruining many other lives. And how easy it is to believe that other lives haven’t been ruined because you haven’t seen it yet, until you witness it your self (hence the climax of the book), and by that point, you are the killer. And yet Anton is not inherently evil— toward the beginning of his entire journey, he stood up to his cousin and objected to the business when he realized that their sales could directly enable terrorist activity. She didn’t care because she’s obviously abusive and just shut him down because she has learned that she must fend ONLY for herself and care about nobody else ever again since her parents abandoned her. He tried continually to escape because he didn’t want to be a part of any of this, he even tried to cut off his family when he realized they don’t actually respect him, and in the end, it wasn’t enough because all along he still made frequent choices that prioritized his own wellbeing over anyone else’s, and that’s what makes him a piece of shit, and that’s why he’s a cheater and a liar and a loser who will spend the rest of his life feeling endlessly guilty about David. Basically same goes for Elena.
As for the plot of this book, I really liked that so many moments were so humiliating and gut-wrenching; the exhausting walk to the party where she humiliated herself and then found the nude art book; the sobbing while stealing the cat; the telling his fiancé that he wanted to part ways on their honeymoon; the parents approving the blackmail; his speechlessness when Gary mentions that Aria’s an obvious thief; Aria’s contempt and condescending attitude toward Anton which eventually culminates in her becoming his killer; the embarrassing desperation with which he took interest in the singer; I could go on, everything was embarrassing and I felt it very viscerally.
As always, Mandel does an incredible service to the world by
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Child death, Confinement, Death, Gun violence, Infidelity, Mental illness, Toxic relationship, Forced institutionalization, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Grief, Murder, Gaslighting, Abandonment, Classism, and Deportation
Moderate: Incest, Sexual content, Terminal illness, and Violence
Minor: Gore
I seriously don’t understand why we needed the protagonist to have a crush on his cousin as a child in this book. It was very uncomfortable and didn’t add anything to the book, aside from a strong example of how the protagonist has always had no confidence, very poor judgement, minimal self-control, sexual impulsivity, and that he revered his cousin as superhuman from a young age, and also that his parents’ thieving lifestyle quickly led him to abandon all sense of societal norms and exist instead within an awkward grey area of total moral ambiguity. So maybe it made sense, and of course Mandel didn’t approve of it or glamorize it, but I hated it.