The Guest List

Something that you might have picked up through the different reviews is that I write the blurbs for each book myself. There’s a few reasons for this, notably that some blurbs are in my opinon way too long and I don’t think a good blurb should take any longer than 30 seconds to read; the other reason is that a lot of blurbs will include irrelevant marketing bits like “from the awarded author X”. Nevertheless, I try to keep the spirit of the original blurb alive and try to give it the right amount of depth. If the blurb for The Guest List seems incredibly basic and shallow, that’s because the original blurb is exactly that. The book tries to set itself up as a murder mystery but the actual events do not really translate to that and ultimately, I’m not sure what the author knew what they wanted this book to be hence the vague blurb.

In the The Guest List’s murder mystery, the murder occurs in the last 50 pages which is not quite how a murder mystery is set up, nor does it do the story’s pacing any favours. The delaying of the murder led to me feeling like I was waiting for the first half. Before getting onto how The Guest List introduces its characters and story, I’d like to quickly go over how Agatha Christie introduces her characters and their situation in And Then There Were None. In that book, eight individuals are introduced in the first chapter and there’s not a second wasted on wider descriptions, the introductions are short and efficient; you learn just enough about each character to know who they are, what they do, and have a vague idea of their motivations and ideals, just enough to set the scene and make sure that when someone dies, you immediately know their significance without overwhelming you with information.

Back to The Guest List, Every character has a lot of backstory and a lot of depth to their personality, but I wasn’t actively putting effort into memorising every detail as I was waiting for the murder to happen. Expecting one of the characters to be promptly murdered led to me taking the Approach I have with Agatha Christie’s books of learning the names, the main occupation and maybe a vague record of their motivations. However, I eventually reached the halfway point of the book without anyone having died yet. I then had to scramble to focus on and think about what was happening rather than simply acknowledging it happening as clearly this was not going to be a case of getting someone out of the way before focusing on the remainder of the group. Maybe my reading experience would have been better, having known that no character was a “throwaway” for the murder from the start, however I still feel that the murder mystery promise is broken by having the murder play in essence no role at all.

What I then got out of the book was unfortunately not something I could enjoy as it felt very much like a “French drama”. For context, on French TV, the “drama” genre is very heavy and very depressing with characters often facing mountains of compounded problems with very little levity as the entertainment value stems from the misery itself, and this is exactly what is delivered by The Guest List.

It is an intricate story and web of relationships, and everything does fit in together at the end in a somewhat satisfying way but it’s ultimately too heavy for me. Not only was it depressing, it was also getting frustrating how every person turned out to be human being. The ending does not bring any levity either. The murder happened, the fate of the murderer is never discussed, the friends and couples that got broken during the wedding simply leave in silence, the end.

It’s not necessarily a bad book nor a bad story but I did not enjoy myself one bit and it certainly did not fulfil a murder myster promise. The Guest List is simply one continuous series of hopeless characters none of which are given any chance at redemption and the reader is a mute spectator of their depressing weekend and watches them go back to their hopeless lives a little worse for wear.