Review: 'The Double' by Ann Gosslin
Pub. Date: 2/16/2021
Publisher: Legend Press
Following a violent outburst at an awards ceremony, Vidor Kiraly, a prize-winning neuroscientist and Cambridge don, is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Swiss Alps. When the clinic’s director, Anton Gessen, tries in vain to unearth the missing pieces of Vidor’s life, he suspects his reluctant patient is not who he appears to be. After one of the patients at the clinic goes missing, Gessen has reason to doubt Vidor’s self-proclaimed innocence. But what is he hiding, and who might be next?
Sometimes a book is not served by its own marketing. This happens when a blurb or the praise tries to link a book to other books, or cast the author as the new Margaret Atwood/Hilary Mantell/Ian Fleming/random author who is famous. In the case of The Double it is actually something else. Its cover and blurb strike many of the same tones as many of the countless thrillers being produced every year. The Double is not actually much of a thriller. It is not about the plot twists, the high-stakes chase, the solving of a disappearance. Instead this is a psychological novel, one which attempts to investigate the minds of two smart men as they posture, hide, reveal, and play. Sure, Gosslin introduces potential scares and tries to put the reader on the wrong foot occasionally, but in the end, I think, she wants you to think about them, think about yourself. So it's a shame that this aspect of The Double didn't entirely work for me either.
Vidor Kiraly has reached the peak of his career as he is awarded a major academic prize. But at the ceremony he attacks a man violently, which raises a number of questions. Desperate to keep his mountaintop-clinic open, Dr. Anton Gessen invites Vidor to stay there in the hope to find out how this kindly man switched into an aggressive one. From there they begin a cat-and-mouse game as neither is entirely truthful with the other or, for that fact, with the reader. Small interludes show us the youth of an unknown boy, decades earlier, as he roams Paris for a home. The Double is a novel about inherited trauma, about searching for a home, about origins and about the mind. While much of The Double is promising, it felt to me that some corners were cut. Neither Gessen or Kiraly are sympathetic to me, which may be on purpose, but I also felt like the former was majorly unprofessional and the latter weirdly empty. They are also both given dreadful home lives which are hinted at so often that when the reveal happened it almost felt a little cheap to me. The link between Gessen and Kiraly, their respective traumas and the obviousness of the title; they all led to me feeling slightly underwhelmed once I finished The Double.
While the above maybe doesn't sound too positive, I did keep reading. I occasionally considered DNF'ing The Double but Gosslin did have my attention. I wanted to see what she would do with the story, where she would take it. In the end it became more of a curiosity for me, rather than a storyline I was majorly intrigued by. The clinic in the Alps was worked out very well, I felt like I could picture it, yet so much around it was a mystery that it all felt a little unsettled. While I believe this was in part Gosslin's intention for the chapters narrated by Kiraly, it continued into Gessen's chapters. As the latter chased across Europe in order to find out more about his patient, nothing quite seemed to stick. Some reviewers have complained about the pace of The Double and admittedly the plot picks up significantly in the last third. Gosslin takes her time to make the reader feel comfortable in the world she is creating, before pulling one rug after the other out from under them. Admittedly plenty of hints have been dropped throughout the preceding 2/3 of the novel and I wasn't surprised, per se, at the end. By the time we get to this at the end of The Double, however, some of the reveals or moves didn't feel sensical. Both Gessen and Kiraly make major mental leaps, suddenly gaining certain kinds of self-awareness and becoming active when they haven't before. So yes, still conflicted about The Double but not about Gosslin. I'd be very intrigued to read her other books.
I give this book...
3 Universes!
In the end I struggled a lot with The Double. The story and characters itself didn't motivate me to keep going, but my interest in Gosslin's intentions with this story did.
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