The Insult
Rupert Thomson
Alllllllmost there. Martin Brom, who isn't an especially likeable guy in the first place, is struck in the back of the head by a bullet. It's supposed to be a stray bullet, but I think there was a purpose behind it. I think Thomson wanted to start off with something very interesting by having a character experience this. So, I blame Thomson. He fired that bullet deliberately.
Brom tries to get used to the fact that, for the rest of his life, he won't be able to see (it was a very particular bullet), but discovers that he does, in fact, have some form of ability to "see", but only in darkness. Sort of like a mentally retarded X-Men character. He's still not a very likeable guy, though, and breaks up with his girlfriend (being shot in the head gives him an excuse to be an asshole, evidently) and alienates his already somewhat alienated parents. Then, with this newfound ability to see in the dark, he wanders off for a while to make a life.
He meets a lass, they have a few laffs, and she disappears. Then, the author is shot in the head by another bullet and remembers that it's really truly storytime. The second half of the book is an almost completely different story, a sort of Grimm's Fairy Tales presents Peyton Place kinda' thing. Or maybe just a revision of the novel "PCP and Whiskey for Algernon". I'll never know. Eventually, the various threads are brought together and the novel's done and I can go and rent a David Lynch film.
Here's what I saw as the biggest promise and the biggest failure of this book. The main character had sight and then he didn't. That's a perfect opportunity to explore a completely different sensory realm. Here's a chance to tell a story that would be impossible to tell any other way. A first-person blind man's point of view sure as hell wouldn't play as a movie (although it would be easy to shoot!). But no, we move into this weird surreal and paranoid fantasy of being able to see in the dark. The sole purpose of this seems to be to allow us to be comfortably back in the land of the vision-driven. So, massive potential, followed by massive cop-out.
The story itself, the hunt to figure out what happened to Martin's girlfriend, that's pretty interesting and it could have been easily done without a newly-blinded protagonist.
