Book review: Kill [redacted], by Anthony Good

In the aftermath of a terrorist atrocity, who is ultimately responsible: those who detonated the bomb, or the individual who set in motion the whole process that led those men to plant their bomb in the first place? How far back should culpability or moral responsibility go? For Michael, a retired headmaster grieving for his wife after her death in a bombing on the Underground, this question leads him to an ineffable conclusion; the man ultimately responsible is the politician who sent his country to war. Blaming the bombers, he thinks, ‘is like blaming the soldier’s gun for killing … And then there is the man I hate. The man who, when I think about it, actually did it. Who moved the parts - who moved the bomb-makers and the bomb-triggerers.’ It is this man, the Blair-like politician enriching himself from his time in office, whom Michael determines to assassinate.

Presented as a collection of self-serving statements, confessions and accounts of his therapy following his wife's death, Michael's narrative is one of barely controlled rage and savage cynicism. The politician's name is redacted throughout, but he looms large in Michael's furious imagination; when he sees him on TV, ‘my arms are raised as if I might grab him from the screen’.

One strand of the book takes us through Michael's sessions with Angela, his ineffectual therapist, combing over his troubled relationship with his daughter Amy and his former pupil Paul. Hideously maimed while serving as a soldier in the politician's war, Paul becomes for Michael a symbol of his own culpability as the teacher who encouraged him to make something of his life. While Michael conceals his true intentions from his therapist (‘There are the notes I share with Angela, and there are the notes I keep to myself’), the rest of the book is something of a post-mortem manifesto, an edited collection of brutal fantasies, moral arguments for murder, and reminiscences of Michael's alienating and old-fashioned methods of teaching. Throughout, he recounts the training regimen he undergoes in preparation for his mission (weight lifting, martial arts, deliberately siphoning off his own blood so he can perform at peak effectiveness even when wounded) and the tortuously complex means by which he sources a fantastic arsenal of weapons. Of course, as the author of these edited documents, Michael is revealed throughout as a decidedly unreliable narrator, not quite admitting the full truth to either his therapist or to himself about his relationship with Amy, or the reality of his wife's death. By the time we reach the end of the book, have we been reading a feverishly violent revenge fantasy or a faithful record of events?

Anthony Good's real success here is in establishing Michael's voice. As the vehicle for over 400 pages of rage and sober analysis, one mis-step here would have made the book almost unbearable. As it is, Michael becomes a highly entertaining guide to his own mental breakdown; witty, profound and faintly ridiculous all at once. His preening recollections of his teaching career self-consciously position him as a realist struggling to deal with difficult pupils, but to the reader he comes across as little more than a vicious martinet. His relationship with his daughter is one of clear emotional neglect, and the sentimental romanticising of his marriage obscures his fundamental lack of interest in his wife (unnamed throughout) as an autonomous person. (He spends almost as much space extolling the virtues of his FN SLP MK1 autoloading shotgun and the array of pistols and submachine guns he’s acquired, as he spends on her.) The key lacuna in Michael’s analysis is the notion of agency, as if other people don’t quite exist for him in the same way that he does. It’s as if the terrorists don’t make conscious choices, and neither do his wife and daughter, or his pupil Paul. Only Michael and the unnamed politician are truly responsible for their actions.

This sharp, acerbic novel manages to be both playful and smart, vividly funny and engaged with a serious and almost Dostoevskian question about the morality of judgement and revenge. Formally inventive, written with great verve and confidence, it is a highly impressive debut.