JOIN USThe trap
Melanie Raabe
Pan Macmillan
2016, pp 216, Rs 399
Melanie Raabe, through her debut thriller The Trap, slickly translated from the German Die Falle by Imogen Taylor, has you pinned down from the very first line “I am out of this world”.
Unputdownable is a mild epithet for this volatile tome which breathes such intense desperation, leaving you at once drained and craving. And this young journalist by profession has set a formidable challenge for herself in the years to come. She has notched up the reader expectations and may not find it easy to make her yarns live up to the standards she herself has set. But, should she fret about that now or relish like her protagonist the acceptance she has received from the readers, the publishing world, and the film industry?
Intricately plotted and meticulously worked out, The Trap pivots around the young and inscrutable writer Linda’s reclusive ways and forbidding house. Her mystique stems from her insular lifestyle, hints of a grim past, phenomenal success and celebrity status as a popular novelist. Her house at the edge of the woods completes the atmosphere of doom and foreboding, dark memories, smell of blood, scents of sibling rivalry, jealousy, suspicion and nastiness. She spies her sister Anna’s killer on television one day and decides to invite him over to her lair on the pretext of an interview with her, hoping to extract a confession from him at gunpoint.
This review does not intend to divulge the story, but must hint at the breathless pace of narration, the convincing build up of the momentum, and the merciless dredging of psychological minutiae of a trauma survivor. Even the conventional whodunits are passé now and have moved on to howdunits and whydunits involving tortuous, surgical dissection of the vagaries of human psyche.
Raabe resorts to the time-honoured technique of nested fiction, perhaps to accentuate the layered mind of her leading lady; Linda’s narrative of revenge is punctuated by the chapters of her new novel which is a fictionalised version of her own trauma. Thus life and art, the real and the imaginary, cut into each other, offering curious insights into writing as healing, as sublimation, and as an investigative/introspective tool.
Again, the play of fact sliding into fiction and vice versa is limned by deep philosophical and psychoanalytical ruminations enticingly woven into this simple tale of desire, love and revenge. The storytelling, never for a moment flags, but we are deeply tempted to skip Linda’s novelistic interruptions and get to the truth of Raabe’s yarn. Linda’s passion for revenge/justice, her nervous energy and the cerebral sparring with the suspect is a rare treat in the realm of crime fiction.
Even as the sisterly bonding inflects the story with an irresistible personal tone, the deadly suggestions of sibling rivalry keep us teetering on the borders of fact and imagination, reality and possibility — one fading in and out of the other with a menacing rhythm. And Raabe is remarkably astute in the way she works out the mind games Lenzen plays with Linda. Motifs of Beatles music, the cut flowers and the triangular bond between the victim, the killer and the witness tease the reader with a lethal grace.
You have all the regulars in a crime fiction and much more. There is a murder, there are the resentful, cynical, aggrieved, there are the official sleuths, and there is the killer who is not a run-of-the mill villain. Raabe is not playing the devil’s advocate just for the heck of rustling up readerly excitement and unpredictability. Her nuanced probing into the delicate and difficult mindscape of a person who kills in a moment of frenzy and tries to expiate the rest of one’s life raises several ethical questions regarding crime, criminality and justice. Suggestions of the human self being multiple and fluid, and not one-dimensional and unitary, are more than a century old.
It was sometime in the early years of the 20th century that Katherine Mansfield jotted down those notorious lines in her diary — “True to oneself. Which self?” But how have these notions of plurality of selves in a person impacted our juridical systems in the trial of the accused and in the concrete dispensation of justice? Once a killer always a killer — is that still the only available elixir to slake our thirst for justice? The edifice on which we build our notions of law, ethics and righteousness? Will there be a moment ever in human civilisation where the killer can transcend the moment of madness and rehabilitate himself/herself. And even if humanity shows him/her mercy, does s/he deserve it, or would clemency be a sly weapon in the wrong hands?
The self-inflicted isolation of Linda, her strange habits and lifestyles bear the imprints of trauma on a witness to an act of crime. She is a reservoir of talent reeling on the threshold of desire and fear. Raabe has gifted us a compelling read and I hope the movie takes some time to hit the theatres so that the readers do not miss out on this exciting translation.