Book Review: Revenge for sexual abuse is in the eye of the beholder

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In the past few months, South Africa has seen a number of acts of remembrance for crimes and tragedies. Reeva Steenkamp, a model and paralegal murdered by Olympic medallist Oscar Pistorius, Senzo Meyiwa, the football star killed during an alleged home robbery, and the victims of the Marikana massacre have been resurrected through 10-year commemorations, television documentaries, think pieces and news reports. The families continue to deal with the torment of events that took place a decade ago.

This torment is seldom reflected in crime fiction. Albeit satisfying, the common crime novel presents some lurid crime, inspires hostility against the bad guys and summons some tenacious detectives to ease readers into a cathartic closing. But crime is messy. Years after it has occurred, it festers in the body, crosses generations and remains in the minds of those affected.

“A crime never ends,” says crime writer Margie Orford, whose latest novel, The Eye of the Beholder, explores the theme of crime as unceasing. Instead of striving for a restorative end, the novel delves deep into the nature of crime as never-ending and insidious. 

The mystery and female revenge thriller novel, which stretches from South Africa and Canada to Scotland, follows three protagonists: Cora, who keeps the sexual traumas of her childhood locked in her haunting paintings and away from her daughter; Freya, Cora’s daughter, who is plagued by her mother’s secrets; and Angel, a daring figure who goes on a vengeful quest to annihilate her sexual abusers. Their lives unexpectedly converge and set them on a path to battle the horrors of the past.

With Orford’s novel centred on women victims after the crime, readers experience the survival of Orford’s characters and the agency they exercise. At the same time, the reader becomes absorbed into their psyches, merging themselves into characters being consumed by their pasts. The effect is an immersive and chilling experience that compels the reader to confront the rage and shame the victims feel.

“There’s a complexity of what we think of as a victim and how women survive,” says Orford. “It was very interesting to write about Cora and the daughter, Freya, because no matter how much Cora’s been able to establish herself as an artist and hide, her daughter kind of inherits the harm that her mother experienced in the past, that thing that we call intergenerational trauma. 

“The interest I have in how a crime never ends is also linked a bit to how perpetrators are shameless. They feel no shame. I’ve interviewed rapists and I started to think about where their shame goes, because the women I know feel plenty of shame. It seemed to me that some of the victims process that shame for them, as though it’s kind of transferred.” 

As a fan of true crime, I’m frequently perplexed by the general ease with which perpetrators commit their crimes. Although useful, the sociological and psychological explanations for these acts are often undercut by the brutality of the crimes and the sometimes cavalier attitudes that come with them. 

Orford’s explanation that there’s some kind of transfusion of emotions between the perpetrator and the victim is curious and apt. 

She offers visceral images of this transference in Cora’s narrative. When she falls in love with one Machiavellian-type character who triggers her childhood trauma, Cora reflects on how her very being is altered by his predatory nature. She contemplates on how “her skin was marked by his disdain. [How] it had seeped through every pore, carrying shame with it. Her shame, now of being a woman, was the shame that she had first been put into by her teacher’s hard, thrusting hand between her legs … His touch had erased everything she was …”

Oddly, Orford’s way of demonstrating the exchange at play between victim and perpetrator relates more to the senses rather than through rationalisation. It is this that makes the book so hard to put down, even as it makes your blood curdle. 

The dialogue of senses between the two opposed figures resonates further than the surface-level inquiries of crime fiction that merely asks, “who did it?” or the “gotcha!” moments that in reality, never fully compensate for the terror of the crime. 

Orford’s sensory approach to the thriller and crime novel is also a way to tell the story of those elusive aspects of trauma that escape comprehension.

“We need to acknowledge the shock of physical and sexual trauma, to see that each event is absolutely shocking and needs to be witnessed in detail, especially because of how the damage of that trauma lives on,” says Orford. 

Her engagement with trauma and how it incites shame runs parallel with another emotion that emerges in victims — rage. 

Angel, who was imprisoned for murdering her abuser during her preteen years and whose abuse continues to live on the dark web, represents a kind of fury that can only be sated through the revenge of all the men implicated in her abuse. She’s the combination of a Byronic hero and a femme fatale, but instead of seducing the men who surround her, she attracts the sympathies of her readers as she pursues vengeance.

Orford’s characterisation of Angel is based on the inversion of the controversial novel, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is 12 years old when she is abducted by a literature professor using the name Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with her and later molests her. With Humbert as the first-person narrator, Lolita becomes a silenced figure whose identity is erased. Angel is about the same age as Lolita. 

“With Angel, I was interested in what happens when women stop being nice. So I had decided to give Angel that agency that Lolita was portrayed as not having. I was interested in what would happen if that little girl hadn’t acquiesced and if she had fought back when she could.”

The sensory experience of shame and rage and the thrill of action provided by Angel serve as an attempt to correct the inadequacies of institutions of law enforcement, which were never able to protect either Angel or Cora. 

Cora’s abuse by her teacher remains shrouded in an untellable past and Angel’s replicates itself on the sordid spaces of the internet. When Angel sets off on her retributive journey, which eventually intertwines with Cora’s need to heal and Freya’s desire to understand her mother, the pervasiveness of a crime such as sexual abuse is put into perspective and is felt rather than comprehended through numbers. 

The merging of their stories, despite their differences in identity and intention, also offers a possibility for catharsis outside of the justice systems that failed them. 

In the following extract from the book, Cara’s lover makes a disclosure that paints himself as a victim:

The fillet was as good as the wine and Yves ate quickly — more quickly than (Cora) did — and pushed away his plate. She knew he did not like to see people eating so, before she was full, she put her fork down too. The meal was over. The waiting was over. “I’m telling you this,” Yves lit a cigarette, “because you love me. Because I trust you.”

“What?” she’d asked, impatient now. Sick of this waiting. Wanting it done so that he could take her to the big bed in the bedroom that had a view of the lake.

“I have a criminal record.”

Cora laughed. “What for?”

“Images. There were images.”

“What images?” she asked

“Just two. Nothing really.”

Cora wanted to see them. To see what they were. What he had looked at.

A girl. Girls.

“How old was she?” Cora asked

They were nothing. Just things that are everywhere on the internet. Nothing you couldn’t buy if you went downtown to where such things were sold. But in this puritanical age … Yves lit another cigarette.

“But what?” demanded Cora.

“It was nothing,” he said, but then, “That isn’t everything, though.”

There was more. Cora could see it. There was more. How could that not be all? What else could there be? She pressed her hands together for something to hold on to because her grip on reality was slipping.

Yves told her. He told her that there had been reports of a girl. A girl of 12. In a hotel. A hotel room. In a hotel room. A girl in a hotel room. A pornographic film made or a webcam. Cora could not make out which.

Yves said there was a man there. No, men. Men. Other men. Two men. Known offenders. Directing. A room. A chatroom. A chatroom log. An IP. IP addresses. His address the third. His. No, but not him. Not his.

He was hacked.

How?

He did not know.

“Were you there?” she asked.

“How could you ask me that?” Yves accused. “How?”

It did not tally, but she could not bear the hurt in his eyes when he asked, You believed I could do that?

No, she heard herself say, no, no. But it did not tally. It did not. 

“The record,” she said. “How did you get that if you did not do it?”

A fine was paid. Admission of guilt. His lawyer’s advice. Not his wish, but to save his family. All done now. All gone. A mistake, perhaps, but over.

“You didn’t fight the case to save your family?” she asked. 

A trial would have been too much. The scandal. His whole search history — imagine that. And you didn’t know?

She didn’t know. She didn’t think to look. Love is blind.

He said he looked up everything about her. Every single thing. The way he said it was an accusation.

Should she have known? She should have known. She could not let his secret be this. She had to make it different. She had to make her mind work, make herself work, find her voice … Speak.

“The girl,” she asked. “What happened to her?”

“There is no girl.” Flint in his eyes.

“The girl,” said Cora. “The girl in the hotel —”

“There was no girl. There is no girl. It was a chatroom. They made it up.”

“If you weren’t there, how do you know that?”

“The police didn’t find a hotel because there was no hotel. There was nothing. It was only words.”

“Your words?” she asked.

“Not my words. I told you, Cora.” There was anger in his voice. “I was hacked. Now, let’s put this aside.”

But Yves’ words echoed in her head. They kept going, not letting her hear, not letting her think, getting louder and louder. He was explaining. Explaining, but making no sense.

Explaining and reeling her in with the threads of her love and trust that he had enmeshed her with during his long seduction.

Explaining that there was no evidence in the end. No charges — or rather, charges dropped. She could not make out which. It made no sense. She could make no sense. She saw the words. She knew them. English words. They were there in front of her. Those words of his. His words. Her mind refused them entry. Her mind shut down. Her mind said no, no, no to his bombardment of words.

No when he said that it was nothing. It came to nothing.

No when he said that it was hell. For him.

Her mind said no but her mouth said nothing because the present — and who she was — was slipping from her grasp. Cora thought of the girls in the pictures and the naked girl in the chatroom — 12 years old — and her own skin burned with the shame of what Yves had told her.

“I was that girl.” Cora wrapped her arms around her stomach. “Once, I was that girl. That girl was me —”

“Don’t do this.” Yves cut her off immediately. “Don’t make this about you. This thing, this train smash, happened to me and it’s done. I’ve dealt with it. It’s in the past. I’m telling you so that you now. I’m telling you because I am a considerate man and because I love you. So don’t try to make it yours. Don’t put yourself at the centre of a drama that is not yours. This nonsense almost destroyed my life. But it’s over now. And I have you. Here. Don’t I?”

“It’s too late,” Cora said.

“No, darling. I love you.”

“You’re telling me too late, Yves.”

“I wanted to be able to see you when I told you. To be able to touch you.”

But Yves did not hold her. He did not touch her. He did not try to staunch the wound he had opened up in her chest. The pain of it stopping her breath. It felt as if a huntsman had ripped out her heart and then pressed it back into the cavity, where it would never quite fit again. Cora rose from the table and went out on the balcony, looking for an escape.

The trees were hunched along the frozen lake. No lights in the distant shuttered houses. Across the lake, a car’s lights raked the darkness, setting a shimmer on the ice — and then it was gone. The cold leached the sense out of the landscape, her breath suspended mist. The night made no sound, but the story Yves had told her roared in her ears and she could smell hot stagnant water, which was not possible because the snow-laden forest stretched north, south, east, west.

Below her was a track that led away from the cabin to a footbridge. Beyond that was a narrow road that vanished into the trees. That road — muddied, frozen — beckoned her to come. Walk, it seemed to promise, and you will find shelter. But she was afraid. She did not know where she was. For miles, there was nothing but trees and the wolves within them.

Instead of choosing the beckoning embrace of the snow, she turned and looked back. Inside was the fire. The bed that they had yet to sleep in, the wine. Him sitting there watching her. Waiting. She knew where the danger was. She knew where the darkness lay, but she turned her back on herself and walked into his waiting arms.

Yves took her into his embrace as if it was he who had to do the forgiving. He said, “Let’s leave the dishes and go to bed.” He fucked her with his fingers splayed over her face, a cage barring the light. She could not breathe, yet she did not protest. He twisted her face away so that she could not look at him when he came. As soon as he was finished, he pulled her into the crook of his arm and fell asleep.

The Eye of the Beholder is published by Jonathan Ball and costs R325.