The Eye of the Beholder
Marc Behm
No Exit pbk, 213 pgs, £6.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Here is a textbook case of a book not being as good as it thinks it is. No, not textbook. Textbook would be Jack O'Connell and his execrable Quinsigmond novels. Smug, self-satisfied, pretentious. This reissue of The Eye of The Beholder isn't that; well, perhaps a little of the last. It's about a private eye - called The Eye, geddit? - hired to follow a young man called Paul Hugo and whose case runs on for years and years and, rather than being part of his life becomes his life. But not because of Paul Hugo, because he is dead inside the first few pages. It's his killer, a black widow (when she takes the time out to marry first) called Joanna Eris. The Eye trails this bisexual killer as she shifts about America (and beyond), meeting, stealing, murdering. He becomes steadily more sociopathic himself as he watches her seduce, watches her kill. They become companions in anonymity.
An existential detective story then, a long distance love affair, its self-mythologising belongs essentially to No Exit's more intangible wing, its companions William Hjortsberg and Jim Sallis. And beyond them, Paul Auster (ref: The New York Trilogy) and Japanese lit-star Haruki Murakami. But, as diverting as it is, Behm is simply not as good. It's as well written as it demands (which puts it ahead of O'Connell for one), and its world of endless diners and hotel rooms is tightly sketched. But it's never any more than that, never more a naming of the parts. Like the crossword clue that haunts The Eye throughout his deathly travelogue, the solution is obvious from the off.