Review of Duplicity

James Fleming · Post by **James Fleming** » 31 Jul 2021, 08:39

[Following is a volunteer review of "Duplicity" by Fin C Gray.]

4 out of 4 stars

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The most extraordinary events begin in the most ordinary circumstances. Fin C. Gray’s Duplicity begins with a family in Carlisle, England.

Tom McIntyre is the classic alcoholic - selfish, self-centred, resentful, and duplicitous to his core - raising his kids in a new digital age wherein the invisible boundaries between stability and instability have become blurred. His eldest son, Daniel, grows up traumatised by sexual abuse and the death of his beloved mother, becoming a confused, lovesick, and hateful young man, looking for a loving home somewhere, anywhere. He’s adopted by radicals, and his hate for his father, for the pain Tom’s dishonesty caused him, is fostered into a disaster.

Daniel grew up on Dysfunction Junction; a dark ordinariness found in neighbourhoods the world over. It’s an ugly place, and Gray pulls no punches with his description of it. The sentences are written with detachment and honesty, making the normality behind all atrocities, the humanness behind the inhumanity, plain to see.

Therein lies the book’s power. Noir novelists since James M. Cain have been writing about the simplicity and normality that hides behind our greatest crimes. Dishonesty, fear, hatred, vengefulness, and rage are ordinary human behaviours, seen in workplaces and homes everywhere. The true terror in Duplicity is not in the crime, but in the circumstances leading into it. Gray goes to great lengths to make this clear. The novel moves between chapters headed ‘Today, Friday’ to ones simply titled ‘Then,’ so that the connection between Daniel’s growing up, what came out of it, and Tom’s role in all of it cannot be denied. Did anybody have any control over the man who raped Daniel? Or over his mother’s death? No. But the only person who could have done anything was Tom, and he wasn’t man enough to face those responsibilities. Instead he lied to his family, and to himself, until his dishonesty caught up with him in the form of Daniel’s own lies. Duplicitousness is a contagious disease, like the flu. Left untreated, it festers, and becomes a true tragedy.

There is little to complain about in this book. Occasionally some of the background characters blur together; sometimes the broken narrative of the ‘Today, Friday’ chapters becomes confusing. But the honesty of the prose, the clarity of Gray’s connections between the past and the present, and the flashes of empathy and sympathy for even these darkest of characters, make Duplicity a unique and brilliant novel; easily a getting four out of four stars for the care Gray took in showing evil’s humble beginnings.

It’s a book for the openminded. For it is the ability to identify with the emotions of the characters, if not their actions, that makes Duplicity deeply, truly, unsettling. When the feelings behind Tom’s and Daniel’s actions are seen as average human emotions, the chance encounters and unlikely events become terrifying in their believability. They are two sick people who left their diseases untreated, and then went out into the world beyond Dysfunction Junction with their illnesses eating at them. Though Duplicity’s conclusion may be extraordinary, Gray makes every step towards it seem as believable, as real, as the McIntyre’s family home in Carlisle, England.

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Duplicity
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