One star

 Fiction

The Golden Rule

Amanda Craig

Published: 2020

Publisher: Abacus

Pages: 391, Paperback

I’m giving ‘The Golden Rule’ by Amanda Craig one star but I wish I could add a minus sign before it. It’s just horrible. The writing is preachy and pretentious. The plot, though intriguing (two women meet on a train and agree to kill each other’s husbands), isn’t well-developed and thus unconvincing. I cringed several times throughout the book. I was angry. I was upset. I felt talked down to as the writer almost screams at you to make you think the way she does. I couldn’t connect or empathize with the protagonist, Hannah, so entitled and annoying. I don’t have a single good thing to say about this book. It could have been a much shorter and better read had Craig decided to do away with her ‘social messages’ and just worked on the story.

 I hadn’t heard about the author but I picked up The Golden Rule as it had been longlisted for The Women’s Prize in Fiction in 2021. Also, the blurb was interesting and Bernardine Evaristo, author of ‘Girl, Woman, Other’, which won the 2019 Booker Prize, called Craig ‘a skillful storyteller who vividly dramatizes our lives with wit, wisdom, and compassion’. But wit and compassion are exactly the things that are lacking in The Golden Rule.

 The characters come across as snooty and rough when they are trying to be nonchalant and smart. The dialogues are mundane and clichéd. There is an instance where Hannah’s husband hits her and Stan, the guy she is supposed to kill but ends up being attracted to, rushes to defend her. Hannah’s response to that, ‘Please, stop, I don’t need rescuing by the patriarchy’ made me want to violently fling the book from the terrace of my home, which was where I was reading at that point. Who speaks like that? Who writes like that? It’s the worst line ever written.

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 The author has tried to tackle so many issues at once that everything feels forced and fake. There’s the issue of Brexit with Craig scrambling to explain why those who voted out did so. There’s domestic violence, single parenting, the rich-poor divide, losing a loved one to cancer, and how messy and complicated divorce can be. It’s almost like Craig felt the need to address all these important issues just to have a say in the matter.

 Then, she also brings in race, religion, LGBTIQA+, and acid attack in the last 100 pages. They are there as an afterthought—Craig probably went ‘oh wait, I didn’t include these issues’ and hurriedly made things up, adding a line here, a paragraph there. The book is an utter mockery of serious issues that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.