Throw Me to the Wolves
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
**WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD 2020**
'This is literary fiction as it should be: in stylish, surprising, lyrical sentences we are forced to confront the hidden power structures, public and private, that control our everyday lives' The Times
A young woman has been murdered, and a neighbour, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner - intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes - he is the perfect candidate for a media monstering.
In custody he is interviewed by two detectives: the smart-talking, quick-witted Gary, and his watchful colleague, Ander. Ander is always watchful, but particularly now, because the man across the table is his former teacher - Michael Wolphram - whom he hasn't seen in nearly 30 years.
As the novel proceeds, we watch Wolphram's media lynching as ex-pupils and colleagues line up to lie about him. In parallel, we read Ander's memories of his life as a young Dutch boy in 80s England. Another outsider, another loner in a school system rife with abuse and bullying, Ander has another case to solve: the cold case of his own childhood.
Though it deals with historical abuse and violence in schools, and the corrupt power of the popular media, Throw Me to the Wolves is about childhood and memory. A perceptive and pertinent novel of our times, beautifully written and psychologically acute, it manages to be both very funny and - at the same time - shatteringly sad.
*LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER 2020*
*A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020*
Customer Reviews
Wolf man
The author was born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian mother and an English father of Irish descent, then grew up in Belgium. Has also lived in Venezuela, Iran, Romania, and the UK where he teaches French and Comparative Literature Oxford. Now that’s life experience for you.
This is his second novel. The first, The Last Hundred Days (2011), is about the end of the Ceaușescu regime in Romania. He’s published non-fiction and poetry too
This one is a police procedural with a twist—a few of them, in fact— based loosely on a 2010 case in Britain where a former public school teacher questioned in a murder investigation was pilloried viciously in the press because he had a somewhat eccentric appearance.
The suspect here Mr Wolphram, who retired from a prominent Kent public school after it went co-ed, leads a solitary existence in a heritage listed house with his books and classical music for company minding his own business until his 31-year-old single female neighbour disappears then turns up murdered.
The senior detective and narrator Ander is Dutch, but attended the above-named Kent public school on a scholarship back when Mr W taught there before proceeding to university. Ander’s offsider Gary is a Brit born on a council estate, with a basic education but considerable street smarts and a pithy turn of phrase.
The case is hampered by increasingly strident media vilification of the suspect, against whom the investigating officers have no hard evidence. Mr McGuinness uses the narrative to explore issues of alienation, otherness, bullying in English public schools, and the post-truth press among other things.
The prose is a little overdone with erudition and sentence fragments at the beginning, but a pleasure once he finds his rhythm with plentiful poetic turns of phrase as might be expected from an author of this background.