The Regret by Dan Malakin

 

Full disclosure: I know Dan Malakin slightly. Back in about 2005 to 2008 we were both in an online writers’ group, Alex Keegan’s Boot Camp, famed for its forthright approach to literary criticism. Or brutality, if you’d prefer. We also spent four days on a writers’ course at Alex’s house in Berkshire, and we met up again once more, along with the estimable C.L. Taylor (another Boot Camp alumnus) at the launch of Alex’s short story collection in London. However, as a former Boot Camper, Dan will know that none of this makes any difference and I won’t pull my punches in this review... 

Actually, I don’t need to. The Regret is a quality novel for a number of reasons, and Dan Malakin is a skillful writer. One of the areas we used to score stories on in Boot Camp was pace, by which I don’t simply mean that the story rattles along at a tremendous lick, but rather its pace is in sympathy with the plot, character, theme and mood of the work. The Regret does indeed rattle along at pace, but importantly this is not to the detriment of character or emotion. Where many novels eschew character building in their headlong impulse to thrash the story along, The Regret draws us expertly into the troubled mind of the protagonist Rachel, a woman who has suffered trauma in her life and is now, forcibly, having it revisited on her. Previously hospitalised for anorexia and associated mental health issues, she reacts to the terrifying position she finds herself in by reverting to type, and observing Rachel’s disintegration is harrowing. The reader wills her to succeed, even as she descends deeper and deeper into terror. It’s brilliantly handled. 

It’s a very modern story, and it confronts issues central to the 21^st century zeitgeist, looking at social media and the often malign influence it can have. The story revolves around a hacker who targets Rachel by using sophisticated computer hacking skills to take over her social media accounts, to intercept her wages and have them redirected to another account, to fabricate reports on her work computer to make it appear she has been negligent in her work as a nurse. In our massively connected world, where everyone is online all the time and our personal information is far more vulnerable than we would care to recognise, the dangers Rachel faces are all too real, and Dan Malakin explores them in a dramatic and telling way. The ease with which Rachel’s life is torn asunder is chilling. 

For all its modernity, though, there’s a Hitchcockian feel to the narrative, based as it is on an innocent whose life unravels because of the actions of external agencies. At first, of course, no-one believes her, thinking she was responsible herself for some of the things which happened. And, typical of the genre, details are layered ever denser, with new things happening, gradually increasing in intensity, gradually pulling Rachel ever closer to disaster. But just when you begin to think “hang on, that’s a bit implausible”, something else crops up which explains it and makes it credible again. It takes tremendous skill to be able to continually throw new adversity at the main character while all the time making it believable. Dan Malakin achieves this brilliantly. 

All in all, this is an excellent read. Dan has just signed a two-book deal with Serpent’s Tail and it’s not hard to see why. If you want a story that zips along at electric pace, but still packs an emotional punch, then The Regret is the book for you.