My Best Friend's Murder

MY BEST FRIEND’S MURDER
Polly Phillips
Simon & Schuster

REVIEW BY PETER STUPPLES

London. Clapham Common (formerly lower middle class, now gentrified). The Present. Bec Maloney, the narrator, a twenty-something sub-editor working for the woman’s magazine, Flare, is engaged to Ed for the first two-thirds of the novel, before he proves unfaithful just as their elaborate wedding plans are coming together.

Bec’s best friend, Izzy Maxwell-Martin, is married to Richard Waverly, ‘‘a dead ringer for Tom Cruise’’, "a wanker-banker’’ who drives a Porsche. Bec’s brother, a fitness trainer, is dating an Oscar-winning American superstar, Sydney Scott. This sextet is the framing group for what starts out as a lit-lite story of those with everything.

Possessions are known by their brand, the latest fashions in the up-with-the play upwardly mobile. Partners are trophies. Work means providing services for their cloned peers. Those engaged in worthy professions, such as teaching, are regarded as failures. Those using thoughtful or complex language are brushed aside as archaic. The reader is perplexed: is this simply trash-lit or could it be social satire? A pre-publication blurb calls it ‘‘a perfectly-paced page turner’’. But you turn the pages waiting, it seems for ever, for the novel to come to life. Only in the final third does it fizz at last.

Bec and Izzy have always been best friends but also rivals – from their school days to a competitive adulthood. They competed for males, for jobs, for status, so intensely that the word ‘frenemies’ perfectly describes their relationship. Bec and Rich, meeting one evening by chance, return to his home to find that Izzy has fallen down their uncarpeted wooden staircase. She is badly injured, rushed to hospital where, soon after admittance, she dies.

Was it an accident or murder? Bec, telling the story, at first engages our sympathy but as the novel progresses, we learn that she is frequently a liar and cannot keep a secret. Rapidly we come to understand that those with everything actually have nothing. Their lives are held together by their possessions, by brand tags, including their trophy partners. Their occupations are sugar-icing on the over-rich cake of a sick capitalism.

The dark denouement is deftly handled, the plotting intricate. Izzy was, indeed, murdered, but who or what is ultimately to blame?

Peter Stupples, now living in Wellington, used to teach at the University of Otago
 

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