Paranoia
Paranoia may be too imprecise to perfectly describe the state of mind of the book’s protagonist and narrator, but it beats anxiety which is a term that pops up frequently in reviews of the story. Anxiety in the face of the modern world is one thing, but when a book specifically opens with the narrator asserting that her “first inkling that something was wrong was waking in the darkness” it is safe to assume something a bit more psychologically focused than general anxiety disorder at work here. That entire opening chapter is almost a modern-day equivalent of the hysterical first-person account of the murderer in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Except, of course, that the protagonist here is not a murderer already driven half-mad by guilt and paranoia. There is no guilt underlying the terror in that chapter, but the fear is palpable. Of course, at this point it would very much seem as though the narrator has reason to be terrified. It is the stimulus behind the intensifying paranoia which develops as a result.
Perceptual Disconnect
That opening scene in which the narrator wakes up in the middle night to the unexpected visitation of a cat used to carrying out its nocturnal adventures on the other side of a locked door sets the stage for thematic recurrence of perceptions being tested in one way or another. That the cat is where it is not expected to be immediately sends the narrator onto a paranoid fantasia about that door not being shut and the possibility of consequences far worse than the cat being trapped inside. At almost the exact moment that this perceptual possibility is finally jettisoned from her mind, reality intrudes to reveal that this secondary perception is the one disconnected from reality. This shift between seeming and being, appearance and truth, reality and illusion, disguise and honesty will run rampant through the narrative from that point forward. The key metaphorical moment encapsulating this theme is the protagonist first boards the ship on which she has booked passage for a cruise:
“I had a sudden disorienting image of the Aurora as a ship imprisoned in a bottle—tiny, perfect, isolated, and unreal—and of myself, shrinking down to match it with every step I took towards the boat.”
The question this moment inevitably raises is how much of the perceptual disconnect that the narrator relates might just another example of this psychological disorientation going on inside her muddled mind.
The Portly Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock
Almost every review of this novel inevitably lumps it in alongside Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train as representative examples of one of the few new sub-genres of fiction introduced in the 21st century not related to the horror genre. Some more attentive (or possibly just older) reviewers also latched onto a commonality by suggesting it is a of a lineage which traces directly back to Agatha Christie’s story about that infamous murder aboard a famous train or the novel and subsequent film adaptations of The Lady Vanishes. That last one is closer to the truth, but still not quite full enough. The story that is told here is loaded with all the psychological trappings of a female protagonist such as in those previous mentioned “Girl” books and the plot definitely gives the vibe of being The Lady Vanishes from a Ship Instead of a Train. But the Hitchcockian connections penetrates so much deeper that it actually does expand into thematic territory. The murder that many other characters refuse to believe happened, the witness that others suspect may be the perpetrator, the protagonist who makes a series of painfully bad decisions that only serve to draw her deeper into the web of mystery, the characters who turn out to be not quite what they are believed to be, the creeping sense of paranoia and isolation of the one person we know we can trust…are all hallmarks of many of the films that defined what it means to describe a crime thriller as “Hitchcockian.”
