Order TRUST NO ONE here
Society has a schizophrenic relationship to death. On one side, we see the death of other people is the ultimate solution to every problem in the world and on the other, when confronted to our own mortality death becomes this sacred mystery that only charlatans ever claimed to solved. It takes balls to write a novel about death and not a novel that uses it to further its agenda. New Zealander Paul Cleave took a courageous crack at writing a novel about Alzheimer disease with his novel Trust No One. It is about the worst possible death I can imagine for someone: slow and confusing with episodes of lucidity. The result is a tough sell that requires active reading, but that comes up a bit short of its wild ambitions.
Jerry Grey is a successful novelist diagnosed early onset Alzheimer at the age of 49 only. He's been living a quiet life so far with his wife Sandra and his daughter Eva as his pen name of Henry Cutter has been shielding him from his fame quite efficiently. As the disease progresses, the difference between reality and fiction starts blurring in Jerry's mind and he starts confessing the murders of his novels. The ruckus Jerry is causing at his nursing home starts attracting some unwarranted attention though as some old murders are starting to resurface and Jerry starts being questioned. Who was Jerry after all? Does he even have memories of the man he once was?
Trust No One is very much adequately written by a professional and confident hand, but the sheer magnitude of what the novel is trying to accomplish causes serious issues on a nuts-and-bolts level. It's difficult for the reader to get a good sense of who Jerry is and why we should care about him as a protagonist if he can't remember the first thing about himself. I get that he's ill and vulnerable, but what made him endearing before? Is it a tragedy that he's suffering from Alzheimer or retribution for a life of tyranny? Part of the mystery of Trust No One is to find an answer to the question to which the answer should be the reason why you're reading the novel.
See the kind of trapezoidal quandary the novel created for itself here?
I believe Paul Cleave was aware of that issue, so he tried to provide part of the answer through Jerry's Madness Journal. Every chapter begins with a short journal entry where Jerry tries to recollect who he is, piece back his life together and confront Henry, which progressively emerges on the page as his dark self. This is very much a personal opinion here, but I thought they made the novel difficult to follow. The entries begin at the Alzheimer diagnostic as the rest of the chapters pick up eleven months later. I know the point is to bridge the gap between the two narrative strands, but I thought it was difficult to rest my attention every time, especially for the journal entries which I quickly ran out of patience for.
Look, I'm not saying Paul Cleave can't write. He is obviously a seasoned thriller writer and I will most likely purchase his other 2015 publication 5 Minutes Alone in the near future. Alzheimer disease is just something really difficult to write about well, especially under the restrictions of genre fiction. Trust No One offers a valid and genuinely harrowing portrait of the disease but it isn't quite successful as a thriller, at least in my opinion. It's too preoccupied by breaking down Jerry's fractured psyche to establish a mystery that's engaging to readers beyond the empathic impulse to want to help a vulnerable protagonist. Trust No One is a spirited, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to write a thriller about a very complicated subject.
