The Execution

by Hugo Wilcken

‘Unnervingly cool prose…an entertainingly urbane thriller [whose] suspense lies not in the whodunit, but in watching a perfect life unravel.’ Daily Telegraph

Matthew Bourne suspects his partner, Marianne, of having an affair – though he has just embarked on one himself. Then one day a colleague's wife dies in tragic circumstances, and Matthew is called to identify the body. Only much later does he realise that this incident has seeped into his life like a slow poison…A riveting narrative of mystery and menace, ‘The Execution’ is a stunningly accomplished novel.

Genres: Contemporary, Fiction, Crime

212 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Hugo Wilcken was born in Australia and is now based in Paris. He has written the novels The Reflection, Colony and The Execution, as well as a book about David Bowie's album Low.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Execution is told by Matthew Bourne, a PR specialist working for a human rights organisation, Africa Action. The book opens with an unusual sequence in which Matthew feels compelled to accompany his colleague Christian, a man with whom he does not have a particularly close relationship, to a hospital after the apparent death of his (Christian's) wife in a car accident. Soon afterwards, Matthew becomes obsessed with the idea that his own wife, Marianne, is having an affair, despite the fact that he is carrying on a dispassionate and not exactly discreet affair himself. He starts following her to meetings with the man he assumes is her lover; their marriage begins to disintegrate. The title seems to refer to a case Matthew is involved with at work, that of Jarawa, a political dissident Africa Action is campaigning to save from a death sentence – 'he'd either be executed or he wouldn't be', says Matthew in his typically blank style – but it isn't long before it takes on a rather different meaning.

Matthew narrates in a voice that is cold and often unnecessarily detailed yet somehow vaguely conversational – perhaps like someone giving a statement to the police, trying to give all the required information but not quite managing to cut every vestige of informality out of their voice. Given how the story ends, I can't help but wonder whether that's exactly what it's supposed to be. And yet, for all his lack of emotion, there is something dreamlike about the whole affair. The Execution is a clear precursor of Wilcken's later novel The Reflection, but it also reminded me of Keith Ridgway's Animals: both deal with a man's spiral into paranoia and delusion; both are set in a slightly out-of-focus London; both feel hallucinatory without there being any obvious markers of fantasy.

There's always a sense that something strange and menacing lurks just below the surface of Matthew's deadpan monologue. I kept feeling that even the simplest details were deceptive – obscuring something darker. This could just be me, but even the name of the main character threw me off. It took until after I finished the book for me to realise that it's not the same as the protagonist of the Bourne films/novels; I was conflating Matt Damon and Jason Bourne. After much more of that niggling feeling that this was a name I should somehow know, I finally googled it and realised that Matthew Bourne is the ballet guy. Has the author made a deliberate choice to use a name that may be weirdly familiar – without being immediately identifiable – to many readers, or is it just a coincidence?

It also seemed odd to me that Matthew was only 29; he reads as middle-aged; I just couldn't picture him being that young. Again – author's misstep or deliberate attempt to disconcert?

It's difficult to decide whether The Execution's quirks (other examples being the distinct lack of commas in many sentences, and Matthew's habit of saying 'though' and 'for some reason' over and over again) are intentional. That in itself makes the story difficult to interpret. If they are intentional, then it's all a bit, well, amateurish – like a practice run for The Reflection – but isn't the fact that I'm even wondering about this a sign of its cleverness? Either way, I was gripped by it, even as I was often repulsed by Matthew; the clean, flat style makes it a fast read, and Wilcken makes a horrible character intriguing to the end.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong 4 stars for the second Wilcken novel I have read, meaning 4.4 or so. It's is narrated by a character easy to dislike, Matthew Bourne has a regular partner and a mistress, rarely sees his daughter, and seems to have lost interest in his work for an African charity helping political prisoners.

Wilcken's writing conjures that atmosphere of the noir. From the outset the reader knows that there are problems here, and serious ones. There is also something disturbing about it, but in a healthy way, assuming you are reading the book knowing that it is dark. Without giving much away, would someone in this position really behave like this? It is quite conceivable that they would, and that again, is very much to Wilcken's credit.

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a nearly perfect novel. The New York Times had it right when they assessed it: "An exciting nervy thriller that fulfills the demands of the genre while resonating on deeper frequencies." Well, if it's a "genre"novel, is it literary, some might wonder? I think it will satisfy readers who generally shy away from genre novels. If "literary" means nuanced, rich in negative capability and symbolism, a book that's much more than merely a plot and some characters, a book about the weirdness of being human, then yes, it's a decidedly literary novel.

But because it almost dovetails into the crime novel genre, the book follows certain conventions of that genre. One expects the prose to be rather limpid in this genre. Wilcken walks that fine line between readability and weird philosophical speculation. I thought of Fante at times while reading this. And Andre Gide. But I also thought about Kundera. It's that sort of book, cosmically-enriched and satisfying.

I won't do the plot synopsis thing. If you have a preference for dark stories, then this will probably be your cuppa. I could even see someone doing a reading of this as a novel with a paranormal slant. While the book doesn't overtly skew that way, there are so many uncanny coincidences in the tale, that one begins to wonder. I don't think this signifies an unreliable narrator. It could possibly signify an altered state of consciousness in the disturbed and disturbing narrator, perhaps paranoia, but the coincidences seem to have an objective reality that is befuddling. Maybe Wilcken wanted to experiment with the Jungian concept of Synchronicity. The novel is pretty much laid out along those lines. Weird correspondences occur everywhere in this book. It would take a much longer review than this to catalog them. They get under your skin and move about, like ethereal formication hallucinations.

I found myself wondering whether I would consider this a masculinist novel. The genre to which it is usually assigned seems to have those tendencies. But I don't think that's the case here. There's so much pathos and subtle attention to what human emotions actually are, that one can't come away seeing this as masculinist. One could argue that the book is a deconstruction of certain human emotions and the complex they form in the thing we sometimes call romantic love. There is grit at the center of a horrible man which forms a pearl in a pivotal scene of the novel. In a way, this is a novel about the phenomenology of emotions. And it is a love story. A deeply disturbing love story. It just happens to be couched as a story about murder.

This book also wants to explore the philosophical proposition that perhaps we sometimes convince ourselves we inhabit emotions, soi-disant, without experiencing them. This question of human sincerity or authenticity is examined and seen as problematic. The author seems to propose that many emotional states might actually be intellectual camouflage. (What might the camouflage be covering? ) This is a scary, heady idea. And the novel embodies it well, in the interactions between many of the characters. Things in this novel seem to happen in ways they happen in the quantum world. In a way, that "quantum" reading might explain some of the weird correspondences that happen across great distances in here. Maybe Wilcken is playing with quantum entanglement. This is very thoughtful prose designed to make you question your own hardware and software and how they interrelate.

The one quibble I had with the book is a small arguing point about physics. I don't want to give any spoilers, but I'll say I had a problem with one sentence describing where some tulips ended up. On page 101. It was actually only four words, but it bothered me, because the visualization didn't follow through for me. That is the only point in the novel where I wanted to argue with the prose at all, and that's not a typical reading experience for me. I usually want to argue a lot more with an author's prose. But this book just cast a spell and the spell never broke otherwise during my reading experience.

[Erin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Two thumbs down. It's so disjointed....I can see where the author was trying to pull it all together with some artistic style, but it falls painfully short of the mark. Disappointing.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice.

[MountainAshleah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this novel as a weekend diversion, a lightweight intrigue story I could read for entertainment rather than substance. The novel has its moments but ultimately it's just too contrived for me, kind of like Ruth Rendell without her brilliant gift for making obsessives out of ordinary characters.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book full of unlikable people. The book itself is very meh, but at least it’s a quick read

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matthew Bourne works for a minor human rights organization whose current project is to save a deposed African leader, Jarawa, from the execution of the title. He lives with his artist partner Marianne, to whom he is unfaithful, and their small daughter Jessica. Despite his own infidelities, when he discovers that Marianne has taken a lover his life and his mind begin to unravel until he finds himself committing an impulsive act of murder. But will he ever have to face the consequences?

None of the characters in this book are very admirable, least of all Matthew himself, our first-person narrator, whose narcissism amounts to a nigh-pathological condition. Marianne is almost equally self-indulgent, playing the artsy card at every turn and trying to induce Matthew finally to marry her even at the same time as continuing her infidelity. The three-year-old Jessica is a self-centered brat, as three-year-olds tend to be, but it never seems to occur to either Marianne or Matthew that their behavior is so very similar to hers.

It doesn't stop there. The condemned politician, Jarawa, was apparently ruthless when in power and a wife-beater to boot. Matthew's boss Jamie is less interested in human rights than in the success of the agency.

I'm not averse to unsympathetic characters, so for me all of this didn't detract from what I found was a very finely atmospheric piece, one that blessedly wasn't padded out to twice the length, as so many psychological thrillers tend to be today.

What did detract were the stylistic tweenesses of the writing. It is not clever to run on passages of dialogue into long, dense paragraphs that readers have to pore grimly through, counting the quotation marks in case they lose track of who's talking; it's just pretentious, an affectation adopted in hopes of seeming Literary. (It also looks bloody silly when, as on at least one occasion, the author forgets to put a close-quote mark in.) It's not clever occasionally to slip from past into present tense for no apparent reason, and then back again; it's just cutesy. (Yes, I know French novelists do it all the time, but this is not a French novel.) And it's not clever sometimes to use quotation marks for direct speech, sometimes not; it's just silly.

All of these self-indulgent quirks are made doubly irritating by the fact that Wilcken is at core an excellent writer. The text is fairly compelling despite them. How much more compelling it might have been had Wilcken chosen to write "in clear" is anyone's guess.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Hugo Wilcken's The Execution perhaps ten years ago, most likely on the basis of a review, and I remember being transfixed by the concise writing and clean, tight structure of this suspenseful story of transgression, death, guilt and redemption. I had thought about this novel often over the years, even revisiting scenes in my mind. But when I picked it up to read it again, I was prepared to be disappointed because time has a way of exaggerating the virtues of books we admire and how could this one possibly live up to such inflated expectations? Happily, that is not the case. Wilcken's first novel remains a riveting reading experience, a thoroughly engrossing and fascinating rumination on mortality, fidelity and guilt. Matthew Bourne, as some commentators have pointed out, is not a likable character. Self-involved and manipulative, he views his own sexual escapades as meaningless, yet when he discovers that his partner Marianne is having an affair, he suppresses his anger and instead becomes coldly fascinated with how Marianne and her lover conduct their liaison and arrange their meetings. He works for a human rights organization, and while keeping an eye on Marianne, the high-profile case of which he is in charge--of a man in prison in Africa unjustly facing execution--founders. When he finally brings himself to confront Marianne's lover, the result is tragic and messy. In the last chapters Bourne struggles with his guilt as he senses the police closing in, finally attaining a kind of peace only at the very end. The Execution leaves an indelible impression, not so much because we care what happens to Bourne--because we don't--but because of the author's utterly convincing portrait of a killer twisted by guilt. Highly recommended.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a shame that such a talented writer should pick this unlikable character and this relatively ordinary “tale of violence” for his first novel. This is one of those odd sorts of bad books that is skillfully told by way of a first person narrator who, for much of the book, appears to be a riddle worth cracking--someone whose vision of the world is askew in some fundamental but elusive manner, or maybe someone who is hiding a significant event in his past. Unfortunately, as with Kazuo Ishiguro’s lesser novels, this proves to be beside the point since the whole thing adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The plot, in the end, simply revolves around a routinely sensationalized act of violence. Also frustrating is that the book’s anti-hero is unconvincingly passive at many points. And after the final page you can’t help but ask yourself: “Really? That’s all I’m going to get?”

Still, Wilcken’s second novel, Colony, is excellent, and I look forward to seeing what he does in future books. But for a novel that’s a much better read, and with a few similarities to this one, I recommend Ishiguro’s debut novel, A Pale View of Hills.

[Vesra (When She Reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

omg! I pulled this out of the shelves to read because we had a storm and tv with the internet is off. And I never thought it is this much of a page turner.

It's about a life of Matthew Bourne, a human right activist who is trying to save the life of Jarawa. In the midst of trying to do this, his own life is falling apart. He has live-in artist partner with a daughter, and on the side a mistress of his own. He found out his partner is sleeping with somebody else.

it was kind of annoying at firts because it took me a few chapters to realized what's exactly is going on. but it's a good past time reading. some plot really do pull you into the book itself.

[Reid Page-McTurner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tight, dread inducing, soaking with style and subtle suggestions of violence and surreality. Theres a strange banal domesticity To it but at the same time this sort of hallucinatory culmination. Perfectly recommended after another favorite Tony & Susan (Nocturnal Animals). I actually really liked the main character, as deadpan and narcissistic he is. I loved it.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book on so many levels, how Mathew is completely selfish and hurts those around him out of his love for them. It is a great read and I wish that I had a few more books that could leave me as intrigued and full of emotion as this novel does.

[Beks Tutt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pager turner!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing grabbed me on page one and held on

[Mills College Library]

Fiction W6671e 2003

[Jill Bowman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was less confusing but just as hard to understand as The Reflection. I liked that one better. Time to move away from Wilcken.