Customer Reviews

A Thousand Cuts: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Told in alternating chapters of witness statements and straight narrative, this engrossing book explores what leads up to a shooting in a London school in which three students and a teacher are shot, before the gunman turns the weapon on himself. There's no mystery in who did it - obviously. But having shot himself, there is no clear source of information on what drove him to this action. The school and the police see it as a tragic, but clear cut event. All that is except for female detective Lucia May. Perhaps it is her female sensitivity that leads her to not accepting the easy answers, or perhaps its her own treatment within the all male environment of the Met that won't let her rest until the real issues are addressed.

The book is fast paced and well written. By and large the difficult task of making each witness statement sound distinct from each other is carried off well. Not only that, but at the start of each interview you are never sure who is speaking, but each becomes clear without the author ever seeming to labour the point. The result is a disturbing, poignant exposé of what the press would call "institutionalised" bullying both in the school system and the police. Exposed too are the all too real effects of political pressures that have the effect of maintaining the status quo.

Lucia May in particular is a well drawn character - and one that I'd love to read more about. It is her story and her investigation and perhaps some of the other characters are less well fleshed out, although equally this affords pathos to the story, which is all too real and feasible.

I liked the general tone of the ending, but wasn't quite convinced by Lucia's final lines, which didn't seem likely to have had the effect that they are suggested to have, but all in all, a terrific, thought provoking book and highly recommended.

This is a great mystery debut. The hero gets bullied (sexual harassment) while she investigates an assassin who was driven to kill by bullying at his school.

It's a mystery melodrama, not a literary novel, even though its literary techniques give the book far more life than most mystery stories have. The policewoman heroine is bullied on the job too much for believability (the PRIME SUSPECT tv series did this kind of thing more subtly, and better) and the villainous school headmaster tolerates -- even encourages -- student bullies who are just short of homicidal. The result is that the reader feels more and more frustrated and outraged, while individual scenes tend to sag a tiny bit. We can be made to hate many of the characters; it's harder to believe in them fully.

Nevertheless this is a tremendous effort. I got angry reading, and a short time later (the book is the length of a Robert B. Parker novel) I was deeply satisfied by a nice bittersweet ending. May Mr. Lelic write more and more of these.

When Detective Inspector Lucia May is charged with investigating a shooting by a teacher at a school assembly, her supervisor expects a quick wrap up of the murder/suicide since there were hundreds of witnesses. Lucia's suspicions are raised by the fact one of the pupils from the school is hospitalized after being beaten and traumatized; a crime which no one claims to have witnessed. Rather than writing the report her governor requests, Lucia investigates further and uncovers a culture of bullying at the school that is perpetrated by both the faculty as well as the students. The hostile work environment the shooter faced is similar to the misogynistic climate of the police force, where she is the only female detective.

About half of the chapters in A Thousand Cuts are written in third person and focus on Lucia's investigation and life. The other chapters are the statements from witnesses Lucia interviews. At first the format is a bit jarring as it takes a few paragraphs to figure out who each narrator is, but the way that Simon Lelic gives each character a distinct voice and presents the testimonies in such a way as to tell a coherent and engrossing story makes this book truly unique. This is the author's first novel, and I will be eagerly awaiting his future works.

"Why was the onus always on the weak when it was the strong that had the liberty to act? Why were the weak obliged to be so brave when the strong had license to behave like such cowards?"

So asks DI Lucia May in A Thousand Cuts (originally published in the UK under the title Rupture), the debut novel from author Simon Lelic. May is the detective charged with investigating the seemingly open and shut case of a shooting at a North London comprehensive school (the equivalent of an American public high school) that leaves five dead, including the gunman. The investigation that unfolds is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit, as it is clear from the outset that the shooter was one of the school's teachers, Samuel Szajkowski, who opened fire during a school assembly killing three students and a fellow teacher before turning the gun on himself.

Szajkowski, a young man new to both teaching and the school, is described by students and faculty alike as having been somewhat of a misfit, odd and aloof, who never quite found his footing at the school. This, however, does not seem to DI May to be sufficient explanation for Szajkowski's murderous outburst, and her interviews with students and faculty indeed uncover a truth which is much more sinister.

Lelic reveals the events which led up to the shooting through chapters that alternate between DI May's first person perspective and monologues from various people - students, parents, faculty - involved with and affected by the tragedy. The monologues are meant to represent transcriptions of interviews taped by DI May during the course of her investigation, but they omit May's side of the conversation. It's an interesting technique, one which lets the reader imagine what was said by May to elicit certain responses, to feel almost as though they were the one asking the questions.

Unfortunately, they are questions which neither the school's headmaster nor May's boss seem to want asked, let alone answered. Szajkowski, it turns out, was the victim of bullying from both students and teachers, bullying which slowly escalated from merely verbal disrespect and defiance, to malicious pranks, and finally outright physical violence. And Szajkowski wasn't the only one. DI May learns that bullying seems to have become endemic at the school, and that only a few days before the shooting a student had been attacked and beaten so viciously that he ended up in the hospital.

Throughout the course of the story Lelic presents an interesting juxtaposition of the bullying occurring at the school with sexual harassment being experienced by DI May in her CID unit, where she is the lone female member. And just as the school's headmaster was willing to turn a blind eye to the bullying within the halls of his school in order to maintain the school's positive public perception, May's boss seems equally willing to take an `it's not my problem, it will sort itself out' approach to the increasingly aggressive and hostile treatment May is receiving in the squad room. And it's the question of precisely how repeated bullying and harassment, left unchecked, sorts itself out which is explored by Lelic through Szajkowski's and May's stories.

Given the recent suicide of Massachusetts high schooler Phoebe Prince after months of relentless bullying at the hands of her classmates (six of whom now stand charged with crimes in conjunction with her death), A Thousand Cuts is both timely and thought provoking. Simon Lelic is definitely an author to watch.

Despite opening with a shooting in a school I found this book hard to get in to (although in the end I did succumb). The style is somewhat erratic, told mostly in transcripts from a tape recorder, which means a lot of different narrative voices. We have kids, teachers, parents all telling what they know about certain events. But of course they only make sense when the pieces are all put together. It is for this reason we have the detective Lucia, who has problems of her own to contend with. It falters a bit in places but in the end it gets you where it wants you to be so, all in all, the style is successful.

The subject matter is bullying, its effects, and, more specifically, who should be held responsible for it in a school or work environment. Rather than throwing so much blame on the bullies themselves, the story tends to focus more on those in a position of care or authority who turn a blind eye to it and are never held accountable for doing so. It also looks at the different reactions those who are bullied have, as well as a slight glance at why someone may bully.

It's not the perfect book. But it's worth a read.

"A Thousand Cuts" is astonishingly topical: the subject of bullying has been so much in the news in 2010 that it's amazing a novel of this quality could have been published the same year. Not to say that the book is perfect: the main character, Lucia May, didn't convince me as a policewoman, and some of the events in the story might be interpreted as exaggerated (though perhaps not, when you look at recent news). But Lelic manages something oft-tried and rarely achieved: writing chapters in the voices of different characters who are truly convincing as individuals. This aspect of the book struck me as nothing short of brilliant. The story drew me in, and I read the entire book in one day. "A Thousand Cuts" doesn't come up with any easy answers to the problem of bullying, but it does point out the necessity of working on the problem--as a society. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in social issues and literary characterizations. It might not satisfy those who prefer detailed police procedurals.

Astonishing, intense and very very sad. This book is a story of what awful awful things can happen when someone is bullied. In this book what is most interesting is that the inspector investigating the incident is also being bullied by her own team. This is such a tough subject to read but this was done in an amazing manner. I really did not want to put this book down. My empathy for the characters was very strong. I imagine all readers will feel for them and the injustices they were forces to suffer through. The bullies were in all forms...teachers, policemen and other students. The sadness came from what actually happened and how each bullied victim suffered so horribly. I found this to be a very insightful reading experience. The author is masterful in his portrayals of his characters.

Have you been bullied? Most of us can say that at one point in our lives, the answer was yes. But have you bullied? The answer to that, most think, is no. But every joke we told at someone else's expense, was it really a joke to them? And every time we laughed at someone else's cruel joke, did our fun -- our tacit consent to cruelty -- cut just a bit deeper?

Death by a thousand cuts was a torture and execution method in China, outlawed in the early 20th century. In today's schools and workplaces, we call it by another name: bullying. And it's just as deadly, even if the victims bleed on the inside. At least in China, nobody laughed. Lelic illustrates how a thousand cuts -- endless days of mundane and escalating cruelties -- can lead anyone to suicide or worse, homicide.

Even with disturbing tales of student suicides evoked by ruthless bullying screaming from recent headlines, little to no one is willing to delve into the unremarkable daily tortures behind the spectacle. Lelic brings the issue of bullying -- by children and by adults -- home with his unsettling, penetrating debut novel. He shows how words become broken bones, and sexual harassment becomes assault. And he shows how unremarkable and average bystanders to the unthinkable are, which makes their cruelty and their inaction all the more horrifying. Through his protagonist, police investigator Lucia, he asks, "Why was the onus always on the weak when it was the strong who had a liberty to act? Why were the weak obliged to be so brave when the strong had license to behave like such cowards?"

Through cutting and bleak prose, he masterfully evokes the gut-wrenching betrayal that bullying victims feel when their cries for help go unanswered, and authority tacitly endorse, or even encourage, unspeakable barbarism. I was transported back to the endless hells of elementary and middle school, where parents and teachers admonished me to stop invoking bullying by "being weird," and how they stood by and did nothing. I was also reminded of the darker times, when I thought death -- perhaps mine, perhaps theirs -- was preferable to this endless agony of sexual, physical, and emotional cruelty carried out with the tacit consent of those tasked with the duty of protecting me. And I wondered, would they hit just a bit harder next time? Would they put out my eye instead of blacken it? How far could they go before I could defend myself? And would my defense be thought of as such, or just the misbehavior of a crazy little girl that nobody liked?

A Thousand Cuts leaves you with the disquieting question: what do we cause when we scorn the weak and plea ignorance in the face of cruelty? More importantly, it ought to give the discerning reader pause, and wonder how many cuts they've inflicted or endured when those with the power to stop it said nothing.

The pivotal event in this masterful debut novel takes place in the opening pages, at first from the point of view of a 13-year-old schoolboy who was not even present when it occurred, "it" being a school shooting when a relatively newly hired teacher shot to death three students and a colleague before killing himself. An event readers may recognize in its similarity to others which have taken place around the world in the recent past with horrific frequency.

The p.o.v. switches to that of D.I. Lucia May of the CID [the only female member of that organization, a not insignificant factor in the unfolding tale], as she takes witness statements trying to come up with an explanation for the seemingly inexplicable. The shooting took place in an assembly hall where the topic of discussion was to have been Violence, and its close cousin [and something also much in the news of late], school bullying. The latter seems almost too innocuous a term for such a psyche- and soul-damaging practice, something thoroughly explored in this novel as it sheds a much-needed light on the subject.

Numerous other points of view are presented in the course of DI May's inquiries to offer perhaps some insight and perspective into the mind-set of the killer. London's oppressive summer heat becomes a palpable presence as she goes about the investigation, in the course of which she learns things she, and certainly her superiors, might have been better off not knowing. She, and the reader, comes to understand the desperation that culminated in the shooting. At times difficult to read, the novel will leave few untouched. Recommended.

A grim but gripping story of a school shooting and bullying in an English school. It uses a very clever narrative device. The story is told from the POV of the investigating detective (herself a victim of sexual harassment) but she interviews the other characters involved in the shooting, and each is given a voice.
There is a certain amount of stereotyping and PC. The physical education teacher is a mindless jock; the black child is a saintly martyr; the administrators are unsympathetic bureaucrats. But it's all absolutely convincing, although some of the characters' methods of dealing with their problems sounded inept. It might be better (in some schools at least) for a teacher to seek a conference with the parents of a troublesome student before resorting to shooting. Zovirax might work better than toothpaste for a cold sore.