Being a Bookworm!

Book Review by Smita Roy

The Pleasures of Men

The Pleasures of Men

If Agatha Christie would have ever been haunted by Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters with a little 'Boo' from Virginia Woolf whilst writing one of her murder mysteries, it would perhaps turn out to be something like this.

The book begins with a detailed gory description of the murder of a girl by a mysterious serial killer known as the 'Man of Crows', quite a symbolical usage of the term (a group of crows is called a murder, for the lesser enlightened ones). The description is notoriously sadist and deliciously bloody, a very unique technique where the murderer kills his victims in a way that they end up looking like a bird.

But this thrill and a hope of getting into the murderer's mind to know when, why and how he started with the killings is short lived. The book takes us through the lives of the hypocritical London society of the 1800s where no matter what was happening around the town, people would still love to behave normal and go on with their high teas and dinner parties showing off new jewellery, clothes and sometimes even domestic help! (It's a woman's narrative remember?)

So our heroine Catherine Sorgeiul, a person of disturbed mental health thanks to an unhealthy childhood, devours the news of the murders and takes to giving a deeper thought to the victims and starts to overwork her imagination to wonder how their roots might have been, how their lives might have been and what really they must have gone through while being murdered. But that isn't her poison really... through the imaginations of the murdered girls' minds, Catherine wants to understand the murderer's mind too. She has imagined him to be so many things... somewhere also developed a crush on him for his sadist acts and thinks her sadist thoughts might just match and he may ask her out on a dinner date and so on! (Kinky). Although at a time when women were not allowed to read the papers or write anything creative or imaginative like a book or a novel except for writing the daily happenings perhaps (so the authoress says), Catherine hides in her room from the world and quietly takes to writing her version of the mindsets of the Man of Crows and his victims.

Simply to deviate and fill in the pages with some 'entertainment' perhaps, there are also descriptions of women having crushes on women and trying out 'things' with each other, which you may want to think may hold any connection with the basic plot that is the murders and lead you to the culprit, but no it's just to amuse you a bit so that you don't doze off.

Everything comes crashing down when the actual murderer is revealed, who happens to be not so interesting as Catherine's imagination and you are left wishing had he at least been half of the hunk she had thought him to be! Instead he turns out to be a complete loser of sorts. Okay, from a psychologist's perspective, such a man can turn to murders for the thrill of it... so let's give it to the lady for her thoughtful analysis of how the character of her serial killer would be like.

The flow is a drag, although certain places it gets to be quite an interesting read; ultimately full of unwanted details about curtains and dresses and hairstyles and embroideries...

Catherine realizes, just like her imagination of the 'hunky' murderer was just an imagination, other aspects of her life too were more of the art pieces of her mind and her entire world that she lived in was actually built on pillars of illusion created for her by her elders. 

Certain layers are noticeable, commendable and would be a good dissection piece for Feminism students. But personally, when reading a murder mystery, I still want the detectives and cops running about dark alleys chasing shadows and finding clues from dirty hookers. Call me old fashioned perhaps?

I would like to rechristen the book, 'The Problems of Women' rather than 'The Pleasures of Men'; frankly even after the book ended I was waiting for the men to have some pleasure in the story!