06 Mar 2014 23:26:19
At the centre of the book is a cat called Roger who, in a seaside cottage on a dark and windy night, has a story to tell: first to a man called Wiggy whose sister and her dog have mysteriously vanished, and then, by extension, to a widowed librarian called Alec who, for some baffling reason, has been given a recording of Roger and Wiggy's conversations.
As well as having the ability to talk, Roger is sarcastic, well read and, as is only fitting in a book by the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a stickler for good grammar. Perhaps most amazingly of all, despite looking relatively youthful, Roger was born in 1932: "the year the Mars Bar was first produced, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and the Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened". Roger really does have nine lives, albeit with Beelzebub as his "line manager". His dark recollections of this allow for some poignant musings from Truss on the gifts that mortality gives us, which we too often overlook.
Roger's story is told in the form of notes, picture files, emails and even a screenplay, of which Alec, the librarian, is a kind of curator. Reading it is like walking at speed through a steep, higgledy-piggledy town at dusk – perhaps one of those found in Dorset, where the book's climax takes place. It has a whiff of Dennis Wheatley and MR James about it at times, but also a slight aroma of Radio 4's News Quiz. The line between horror and humour is an awkward one to walk, and Truss reaches a little lazily for pop cultural references on the way. Roger "sounds like Vincent Price" and "is the feline equivalent of Stephen Fry"; Alec's dog Watson "sounds like Daniel Craig".
This slightly undermines the genuine flair for the macabre that Truss displays elsewhere, and the great pathos with which she writes about the gossamer thread sometimes separating life from death. The scene where the grieving Alec saves Watson from being run over is particularly affecting, and, later, what is ostensibly a silly set piece involving two talking cats under a satanic spell turns into a powerful allegory for bullying and the roots of human evil. Truss brings an eerie, 19th-century kind of horror story into the present-day world.
