Good Behaviour by Molly Keane

This book is incredibly dark and depressing, and very very very bleakly satirical. Basically it's about the unsavoury events lurking behind the proverbial stiff upper lip, which it is 'good behaviour' to ignore. Even though it's well-plotted and interesting, I found it a little too obvious and painful to read because of how pathetic the narrator is. Many of the events are horribly, fascinatingly twisted, but the narrator, the eldest daughter of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, is walking through it all seemingly with her hands over her eyes and ears. I found the gap between what the narrator tells and what is really happening to be too obvious, as readers we are supposed to read through the narrator's story a little too easily. There is no moment of a 'big reveal' when we find out the narrator's point of view has misled us (like in Atonement), but reading the book is a continual process to seeing the events that the narrator herself refuses to or cannot. I personally didn't like the style it was written in, and found the narrator so deluded and tormented that it was hard for me to read. However, there's quite a bit of dreadful, shudder-worthy horror; a mix of alcoholism, sex, perversity, adultery, prosecuted homosexuality and eventually murder, bursting out from behind a perfectly and desperately constructed veneer, and that I thought was very well done.