Novel weaves tension, morality
The Sun’s book club is discussing Owen Sheers’ novel I Saw a Man. We will be chatting online with Sheers when he is in town for the Vancouver Writers Fest in October. Plan to join the conversation at vancouversun.com/books.
Tracy Sherlock: I really enjoyed this book. It was a pageturner for me, even though it was superficially just a man looking for a screwdriver in his neighbour’s house. Sheers managed to create a lot of suspense out of almost nothing! The backstory to the various characters carries readers through to the suspenseful parts quite well.
Melanie Jackson: I agree about I Saw A Man being a page-turner, Tracy. The novel reminded me of Ian McEwan’s Atonement in that it presents what is real from different perspectives while asking intense ethical questions of both the characters and the reader.
I’d say that I Saw A Man is very much a story about storytelling. Michael is a journalist who writes compelling books about people and their social conditions. His “technique was immersive,” as Sheers describes; he doesn’t get personally involved. By contrast his wife Caroline, also a journalist, gets right under the skin of a story. She goes, lives and experiences the story — and eventually dies in the middle of it.
There are other types of storytelling: truth and lies. One character unwittingly causes an accident; no one knows, so he pretends he was elsewhere. Another person who should have been on the scene was off at an illicit rendezvous.
Taking the first character’s perspective, it’s hard not to egg him on: Don’t tell! It will make things worse! In the end, you as well as the characters do some soul-searching.
Monique Sherrett: Overall, I thought this was a fun, literary thriller and I echo Tracy’s sentiments that it is more than a story about a man looking for his screwdriver in his neighbour’s seemingly abandoned house. Owen Sheers creates some great tension in the telling of the basic plot line around the anxiety of looking in on a neighbour and finding the door ajar.
Sheers reveals details about each character in a way that divulges small lies and fullblown deceptions.
What the reader knows, but the neighbours do not, is that Caroline Marshall was a retired reporter who went back into the field and was killed on assignment in Pakistan.
Another tension in the story is that between the neighbours Josh and Samantha. Are they a happy married couple with two kids or bickering partners? Is Sam really away on holiday or has something untoward happened with the screwdriver?
Ian Weir: “Literary thriller” is one of those amorphous terms that can mean pretty much anything, or nothing. But I Saw a Man is really stunning.
I love the complexity of the novel’s exploration of moral culpability. And boy, what a punch that central ethical question packs — who is to blame for the crimes that nobody commits? — in an era of drone warfare and braying politicians. Great book.
Our book club panel includes Ian Weir, author of the novel Will Starling; Vancouver young adult author Melanie Jackson; Daphne Wood, the Vancouver Public Library’s director, planning and development; Julia Denholm, dean, arts and sciences, Capilano University; Monique Sherrett, principal at Boxcar Marketing and founder of somisguided.com; Trevor Battye, a partner in Clevers Media; Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun books editor; and Bev Wake, senior executive producer sports for Postmedia Network.