Aug 18, 2024 10:53
Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household was the latest pick for our family book club, which met yesterday.
It's a thriller written in the late 1930s about a man who travels to an unnamed country with the supposed intention of possibly assassinating a prominent figure, is caught in the act, escapes and then spends the rest of the book fleeing pursuers.
It's only 180 pages long (which I have to admit is the only reason I managed to force myself through it) but the narrative is filled with so much incredible detail about the protagonist's actions that the story could easily have been told in half that, without losing any of the pertinent events.
Which made it, in my view, a very tedious read and not really very exciting at all, for a purported thriller.
There were aspects I enjoyed (I liked the cat!) and I thought it all came together very cleverly in the end (the last few pages were the best, in my view).
I also thought our discussion of it at book club yesterday was interesting and raised some points that made me view the book in a somewhat better light overall.