I usually visit the library once every couple of weeks. I’ve got quite the system in place where I often have two to three books to return and two to three requested books to pick up at any given time. Yet I can rarely stick just to the books I’ve requested. I can’t help myself from looking around and perusing the shelves and displays. This book was one of those instances where the cover caught my attention and I couldn’t resist taking a look.
With a cover that looks like a tribute to American Psycho, The Consultant just struck me as the type of book that would be my thing. And I suppose that’s the sort of thing with judging a book by its cover. Something we shouldn’t do, but I feel like pretty much everybody does. I can pick up a book and think “This is the sort of thing I’d probably like” or “This looks like the sort of thing that my mum/girlfriend will probably hate”. Sometimes we’ll be in Tesco and my girlfriend will point at a book and say: “I think that’s the kind of thing you’d like.” Sometimes she’s right, sometimes it’s something I’ve already read (and she’s right), but she’ll rarely know anything about the book. She’ll just pick up a vibe from the cover.
The protagonist in this debut novel by Im Seong-Sun is only known to us as The Consultant. We never get to know his real name. The blurb on the back mentions his skills in “restructuring” and “sailing through performance reviews”, which I immediately interpreted as ways of saying that he is an assassin.
The Consultant has a unique job. Through his backstory, we learn how he was an aspiring author and down on his luck, until a mysterious person offered him a job he couldn’t refuse. He was handed a cheque with an insane number of zeros on the end. For that, he had to live in a condominium and write for a mysterious employer. He is sent detailed character profiles, and he must write a story about these characters and kill them off in exceptional and interesting circumstances. The Consultant enjoys the creative aspect of the job he has and imagines he’s finally going to get his big break and become a famous author selling millions of copies of his murder mystery novels.
Then comes a second cheque with another insane number of zeros on the end. He can’t believe that anybody is paying him so much to write a story, but he’s not the kind to look a gift horse in the mouth either. Another set of character profiles arrives, and the Consultant takes his time to craft the perfect story with a death at the end.
After writing a third story, he is finally allowed to leave the condo and take a short sabbatical before a fourth job comes his way. During his time off, he comes across a newspaper article that covers a recent death. As he reads the article, he notices that this person was the exact same person he wrote about in his first story, and he died in the exact same way as written by the Consultant. Horrified, the Consultant realises that this isn’t a coincidence. He’d unknowingly plotted the death of a real person, and somebody else had carried out the murder.
Quite quickly, the Consultant becomes scared. Part of him wants nothing more than to get out of this job. But it’s too late for that. He knows too much and knows that it’s unlikely he’ll be allowed to live if he resigns from his position. The company will soon put an end to him. So he’s damned if he does, he’s damned if he doesn’t. The Consultant has no idea but to carry on writing deaths for whichever people are put on his desk next. The problem is, he knows the next person they want him to kill.
While there is a lot to love about this book, and it is a really strong debut, I felt like too much of this story was spent in the character’s head. There’s a lot of the protagonist telling us what happened and how he got to be in the position he’s in. When I think about how a lot of books throw their readers into the action, this one doesn’t do that. For that reason, I felt like I was at a greater distance from the story than I’d have liked to be.
My Goodreads rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
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