So in the midst of apparently pissing off everyone in my math class by destroying their grading curve (I didn’t know about any such thing until now) as a result of scoring in the high 90s on everything I read Pig Island by Mo Hayder.
At the moment Pig Island is her most recent book and has no relation to her past books. To me it seemed as though it was a little less thematic than her other books if only because it seemed like it was throwing more stuff out there. I really did not care for the style of this book, it reminded me markedly as if it was written in a memoir style sort of like Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I suppose that rather than a memoir style it was in a journalistic reporting style. The main character Joe “oakesy” Oakes is a journalist which is how he gets into the middle of everything that goes on in the book, and eventually in the book he starts writing an account of things so it is almost as though we are reading that. I am not a big fan of this style of writing for novels, I’m not even sure what you’d call it since it is not quite first person but it isn’t 3rd person either. Does that make it 2nd person? Shit I don’t know.
In any case this book is probably less disturbing content wise than Hayder’s other works are to most people but something about it really got under my skin. I haven’t felt this way since reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I would describe it as imaginative fear, things are just setting me to fright at the moment like dark rooms and the unknown in general. Indeed my creativity has been questioned, my originality, many times but it has never been disputed that I’m over-imaginative. Which is not great.
Actually this book is similar to House of Leaves in how much its ending pisses me off. It just kind of has a final page. There was a lot of foreshadowing in the book until a certain point so perhaps if I would have made note of those things a bit more the outcome might be further revealed but…. Alright fuck it I’m sick of reading Hayder’s works and trying so hard not to spoil them even though no one could give a shit.
The question in this book is whether Oakesy or this girl with a parasitic twin’s leg that seems like a tail named Angeline is responsible for killing everybody or anybody. And that is not explicitly answered because the book is from Oakesy’s perspective. If you were writing your own account from prison would you talk about how you killed everyone or write a story that painted you as innocent? At the end of the book he got arrested as Angeline was escorted away from him by police. But in the course of the story there is a potential for everything to have been done by Angeline. The thing is though, we are lead to believe that everything was done by her father until near the end of the book when it is revealed that he was already dead by the time everyone else got killed.
So it is entirely unclear, and I am not a fan of inconclusive novels. I am a very literal person most of the time you see, so I prefer my stories that way. The whole problem with the book is that it’s individual perspective so we have to choose whether to believe Oakesy or not. If we believe Oakesy then it must have been Angeline who killed everyone, and this is not difficult to believe. If we do not believe Oakesy then it was either him or someone else entirely that was responsible for everything. Since the guy he thought was behind everything was already dead then that would mean it would have had to be someone never mentioned in the story and that is unlikely. But it could have been because it’s not revealed. The kicker is probably supposed to be that the police say they think he was behind some other murders. So what if he had committed other crimes but not these ones? Or what if he killed his wife in this book but didn’t kill all the people on pig island? Was Angeline really capable of it?
All the characters in this book are so fucked up, that just tends to be the way Hayder does things. I suppose that they’re all a mix of being fucked up by other people and theoretically mentally unstable somehow. A lot of them are on drugs too but… damn I don’t know. It’s probably a good thing Hayder doesn’t have anything else out yet because one more book of hers right now might do me in. I think that now I will focus on reading some other stuff… maybe some math books. Yeah all right.
