The Tension Mounts: I Will Ruin You By Linwood Barclay

The first couple of pages of this psychological thriller got me thinking. We are all shocked by media reports of stabbings and shootings. We live in an increasingly violent society and hope quickly dwindles when such events occur in a school, where our children are meant to be safe. We send our innocents to school each day in the expectation that they will return home unharmed. There are, however, a rising number of zealots, fanatics with a cause, be it political or religious, who are inspired by their beliefs to perform hideous acts of violence, often in cowardly fashion, targeting the vulnerable. As a society, freedom of thought is to be valued but the freedom to act in ways which hurt others should surely be condemned. Sometimes, though, it is simply an individual with a personal grudge who wants to make someone pay, and when Richard Boyle spots a figure, clearly wearing ‘a vest packed with explosives’, approaching the school building where he is teaching, he does not know what he is about to face.

Quick to act, he races from his classroom, shouting the alarm, and stops the interloper from entering the school. It seems, this is one rogue ex-pupil with a grudge and Richard manages to talk to him, finding out why he is there and persuading him to walk instead towards the school field until an explosives expert can undo the wires and relieve him of the detonator he holds firmly in his grasp. Disaster strikes, however, as Mark LeDrew trips over his own shoelace, lets go of the device and triggers the bomb which, fortunately for everyone else, kills only him, and injures only Mr Boyle. It seems, Mark LeDrew was as inept at making a bomb as he was at tying his shoelaces.

My litmus test, as it often is, is that I read it in two days flat!You would expect Boyle to be treated as a hero, and he is, initially, by the grateful staff and students, whose lives he has saved but if that were it, the novel would be finished by the end of the first chapter. Instead, the teacher who was one of the intended victims, isn’t happy that Richard Boyle told the Police why the boy had been there and he decides to stir up trouble. It also seems that Richard Boyle has a good heart and it is not the first time he has fallen foul of his good intentions. ‘Why does he always have to be the hero?’ thinks his wife. ‘What did he say to our son to make him trigger the bomb?’ say the dead boy’s parents who need someone to blame and decide to seek retribution through the courts. And what about the other ex-student, in trouble with some serious villains, who recognises his ex-teacher from the photo in the paper and decides to make trouble for him. How easy is it for someone to make up lies? To blackmail an innocent man who has no way of defending himself from ill-founded accusations and whose reputation can end up in the ashes because after all, everyone believes there is no smoke without fire. A blackmailer doesn’t care as long as he gets the money he needs to pay off his own would-be assassins. How many ways are there to ruin a person? It seems Boyle is about to find out.

Suddenly, our hero finds himself in trouble and tension quickly mounts ‘as events spiral rapidly out of control’. Communication is the key; secrets are not healthy except maybe at Christmas, certainly not when threatened with blackmail and you are not thinking clearly. Richard comes to understand his situation and this reader was sucked in, feeling his desperation and frustration, as he discovers very quickly how wrong things can go and how quickly trust in people you think you know, can dissipate.

The novel touches on all sorts of issues including drug use, intimidation, gun violence, dysfunctional family issues, and sexual harassment. Barclay pours it all into the melting pot to create a breathtaking read as Richard Boyle finds himself in an ever more serious predicament, not knowing which way to turn. The fingers of villainy spread far wider than is first thought and there are a couple of twists I really didn’t expect. Plot-led, the characterisation is, on the whole, authentic and naturalistic although Andrea and Gerhard are particularly odious and caricature ‘the baddie’ nicely, while other villains hide in plain sight.

The fingers of villainy spread far wider than is first thought and there are a couple of twists I really didn’t expect.It seems of little consequence now that I said at the start that the first couple of pages got me thinking. The novel opens in the classroom, a literature lesson. Richard Boyle is passionate about his subject but a bit of a rogue English teacher, more like Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society: ‘Captain, my Captain.’ Boyle is trying to teach a novel which is not on the approved reading list because he wants to challenge his students, to make them think and to help them understand. With a growing list of banned books, how many English teachers today would like to do the same? My initial thoughts were obviously not headed in the same direction as Barclay’s (it would have been a short novel), although he does offer a welcome, if brief, argument in favour of challenge rather than censorship.

For all sorts of reasons, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. My litmus test, as it often is, is that I read it in two days flat!


I Will Ruin You is published by HQ