Havoc: A Novel
“Nothing is really as it seems and, as readers, we have to look for the meaning behind everyone’s motivation, adding to what is a fascinating plot set in an exotic locale.”
“The compulsion: it scratches at my skull and wakes me up at night, drumming is long fingers on my nightstand. Are you just going to lie there and refuse to intervene when you are when you see someone drowning in pain? I had hoped to leave my insatiable need to help others behind in the Alps as it turns out the compulsion was only hibernating, lying dormant all these months till hatch back to life as soon as I found my footing. Believe it or not, I want people to be happy. Or if not happy, then free.
Maggie Burkhart doesn't see herself as meddling in other people's lives, she sees herself as someone who gives the people she meets a second chance in this suspenseful novel with its many psychological twists and turns. A widow who has settled at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, she has learned a lot about people in her 81 years. She’s observant, spry, and not above, well, if you’re not going to call it interfering, then helping others see their way out of miserable solutions.
And that’s what she is attempting to do for Tess, an unhappy looking woman who is staying at the hotel. She has a husband who is frequently absent from her life—business you know--and a young son, Otto. Maggie infers that Tess is practically begging her to help but the pretty put upon mother has more than just a husband who doesn’t live up to his domestic duties. Young Otto is an over-indulged terror, throwing tantrums to get his way. But it becomes clear that he is more just a spoiled brat. He’s also manipulative and a blackmailer. He discovers Maggie leaving a guest’s room (she wasn’t invited but instead was on one of her missions). In exchange not to tattle on her, Otto persuades her to upgrade his family from the room where they’re staying, which is the worst in the hotel, to the best—which runs $900 a night. Otto certainly knows how to swing a deal. But as the novel progresses, we’re drawn into deeper waters—what seemed like an over-involved octogenarian trying to solve life’s problems and help with her own loneliness and a young boy who needs to have boundaries set, becomes much more complex. Otto turns out to have a very nasty streak who knows how to wound.
He devastates Maggie by taking the lock of her deceased husband’s hair which she cut from his head as he was dying and setting it afire, turning it into a pile of ashes.
But then again, is Maggie as innocent as she portrays herself? Is she totally a victim? Or is she an unreliable narrator? Can we believe her interpretation of both Otto’s and her own behaviors?
Bollen, who lives in New York City and writes for such periodicals as Vanity Fair and the New York Times, is the author of several novels including The Lost Americans, A Beautiful Crime, and The Destroyers, makes us wonder as the novel progresses. He keeps the pace of his story moving fast and gives us a slice of life in a different part of the world where intriguing characters, some running from their past mistakes, convene and interact. Nothing is really as it seems and, as readers, we have to look for the meaning behind everyone’s motivation.