Matt Ruff: Bad Monkeys

Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys is, to put it bluntly, a mindfuck, albeit an engaging and enjoyable one. Even when you've read the final sentence, you're still going to be wondering how much of what you've read was all in the minds of one or more of the characters.

It begins in a white room.

It's a room an uninspired playwright might conjure while staring at a blank page: White walls. White ceiling. White floor. Not featureless, but close enough to raise suspicion that its few contents are all crucial to the upcoming drama.

A woman sits in one of two chairs drawn up to a rectangular white table. Her hands are cuffed in front of her; she is dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit whose bright hue seems dull in the whiteness. A photograph of a smiling politician hangs on the wall above the table. Occasionally the woman glances up at the photo, or at the door that is the room’s only exit, but mostly she stares at her hands, and waits.

The door opens. A man in a white coat steps in, bringing more props: a file folder and a handheld tape recorder.

Thus the frame of the story is set. All that actually happens over the course of the novel happens in this room between these people. The woman, accused of murder and suspected of madness, is called Jane Charlotte; the man who is here to uncover her truths - if he can - is called Dr. Richard Vale. The woman will tell him an increasingly fantastic story about her childhood, her mother and brother, and her experiences as an assassin for an organisation dedicated to fighting evil. He will counter her story with information from public records that call what she recounts into question. She will discount some if what he says as misinformation planted by the organisation she works for, and acknowledge some of it as the stories she tells herself because the truth is too painful. In the end, it is possible that no one in this room and nothing that was said is what it appeared to be.

The process of getting to that end is fascinating.