The Fury (2024)
By Alex Michaelides
Celadon, 294 pages
★★★★
Mysteries with omniscient but unreliable narrators are always fun to read because they keep you on our toes. Once you know you can’t trust the voice telling the story, truth is up for grabs. The Fury is such a book. Author Alex MIchaelides calls his murder mystery a “whydunit” rather than a whodunit, though maybe whodunwhat would be better.
We know early on that our narrator Elliot Chase is a liar, but is he telling the truth when he tells us he is in love with actress Lana Farrar? Though she’s older than he, we know that Elliot was once the companion, perhaps lover, of the much older author Barbara West. We also know that Elliot considers himself Lana’s best friend, but does he know the difference between love and obsession?
The Fury takes us to Aura, Lana’s privately owned Greek island near Mykonos. Lana is an American who became a big star in Los Angeles. She now lives in London for most of the year with her 19 year-old son Leo –fathered by her first husband–and is now married to the overbearing Jason. She originally bought Aura for privacy and a break from Hollywood, but now uses it as a refuge from London’s unrelenting grayness. It was on Aura she first met Agathi, who is now her personal assistant wherever the household du jour might be.
The Fury is very Greek in several ways. Michaelides is a very good writer, the sort who can invoke everyone from Ford Maddox Brown and Agatha Christie to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus . If Heraclitus doesn’t ring bells, that’s because he’s been dead for around 2,500 years! He postulated that fire was the basic element of the universe, his way of saying that change–not continuity–is the constant of the universe. He was also known for bouts of melancholy so deep that he was called “the weeping philosopher.” He’s not a character in the book per se, but The Fury often evokes a Greek tragedy and its characters struggle with questions of whether they yearn for the comfort of stability or the enlivening chaos of change. Several experience bipolar mood swings.
Those themes play out on Aura. In addition to Lana, Leo, Agathi, Jason, and Elliot, there is caretaker Nikos, who might also be in love with Lana, and actress Kate Crosby who might (or might not be) Lana’s friend, and once dated Jason and might (or might not be) having a torrid affair with him. Seven people, one corpse, no outside intruders, and a dark and stormy night (the novel’s namesake “fury”). Lana waffles on everything, Leo is furious with his mother for dissuading his plan to become an actor, Jason is a disengaged gun-loving testosterone-poisoned jerk, Elliot is Elliot, Agathi would do whatever Lana asks, Nikos doesn’t like anyone except Lana, and Kate drinks too much.
Agatha Christie would have loved that scenario! (Is Agathi a play on her name?) Of course, Christie would have also gathered all the survivors in the drawing room and either Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would have unveiled the murderer. Not Michaelides. You can read The Fury any of a number of ways, including the possibility that there was no murder or that it took place elsewhere in the past. Or maybe it was a dream, a play, a turnabout staged revenge, a madman’s fantasy, a purloined plot, a straight-forward point-and-kill murder, or any of the above in plug-in combinations. It’s a short book, but the only non-Heraclitus constancy is that few readers will like Elliot.
As a minor critique, some readers–and I lean that way myself–may find it hard to feel much sympathy for any of the characters. Each, in his or her own way, is vain, vacuous, over-privileged, and shallow. The novel often exudes a sense that these seven people deserve each other. I really like how Michaelides crafted the book, though I would have been just as happy had seven guns fallen into seven hands that simultaneously pulled the trigger!
Rob Weir
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