"The Group" by Khurram Elahi

Jag, a rather naive IT consultant loses his life savings through an online scam. He then gets involved with an online support group in an attempt to get his money back. His relations with his wife and young daughter spiral downwards. As he becomes increasingly depressed, he gets a strange message from his scammer, his laptop is hacked and a colleague of Jag's gives his daughter an artificially intelligent robot cat. Jag's only solace is growing potatoes in raised beds in his garden. 

Told in the third person past tense almost entirely from Jag's point of view, this is a blow-by-blow account of normal family life descending into darkness. The author's style is very matter-of-fact reportage interspersed with almost melodramatic descriptions of the hurricanes of emotion experienced by Jag. I loved the fact that the protagonist was such a normal person, living in such an ordinary world. That's what makes this book a classic and powerful example of noir fiction featuring a victim protagonist and chronicling how a crime can disrupt everyday life. 

It certainly kept me turning the pages and repeatedly overturned my expectations of what would happen next.

Selected quotes:

• "The seconds of his hand were ticking, marking a weary indulgence into a grey unpredictable world, fearful of falling into that trap again. This time it had been an expensive mistake and a formidable trap. He now had to somehow squeak his way out and find salvation." (Ch 1)
• "When something is too good to be true it probably is. It ended up being too bad to believe." (Ch 4)
• "Everyone knows you can lose but no one believes it." (Ch 4)
• "his balance was swelling like a city bankers’ stomach." (Ch 5)
• "Then Jag read with a concentration suspended in mid-air, finding himself engrossed in the catalogue of catastrophes that littered the pages of the website. It was like opening the door to his first alcoholics anonymous session, but without any relief. From a human side, it felt like each post was a victim’s vomit spewed painfully out onto the page. His stomach turned. He tried to understand user after user, wrenching out his own heart, placing it on display in a show of open embarrassment, plain for all to see. It was an exhibition without the artistry, a museum without masterpieces. Only naked, humiliated tears of blood in a sordid and candid display of devastation." (Ch 13)
• "Despite knowing that once opened there could be no hiding it, she tried to open it as carefully as possible." (Ch 14)
• "the clock battery could wait. But wait for what, the end of time?" (Ch 18)
• "Today it was sunny, but the shine had all been used up." (Ch 26)
• "He was the muscular equivalent of a stutterer." (Ch 27)
• "Fat blotches of water spitting onto surfaces" (Ch 36)
• "He had to take some action rather than sitting there like a puppet in a show, awaiting strings to help him move." (Ch 44)
• "Living in the same house yet worlds apart." (Ch 48)
• "He was simply living word to word now" (Ch 51)

Khurram Elahi's debut novel, A Change of Seasons, is also reviewed in this blog.

March 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God