Leah
Written on Jul 31, 2011
What you Don’t Know, as you can probably tell by the synopsis on the book is that it’s about cheating. Helen Collins has been happily married (or so it seems) to her husband, actor Alex, for 15 years and they have two children. However as the years have gone by, Helen has found herself wondering what it might be like to sleep with someone else. She hasn’t yet put it in to practice, but when she meets Graham Parks, she has a feeling she might be about to. What really intrigued me about the book was the fact Helen is married to Alex and Alex is gorgeous and the idea of Helen falling for a fat, balding man named Graham Parks was… well, it was baffling; how often are potential heroes in novels fat and balding? Ex-actly! I was interested in how Enfield would play it, how she’d somehow make Graham sound irresistible. I’m a very black/white person; I know there ARE gray areas in life, but when it comes to cheating I’m a staunch supporter of it being a terrible thing; I don’t like it. There are exceptions, but for 99% of the time, I can’t get on board with a book about cheating. I know, I know, it’s fiction so it’s not real, but even if Helen, Alex and Graham’s story isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t really happening somewhere and it just, honestly, makes me feel sick.
Did I expect to hate What You Don’t Know? I didn’t. Despite my beliefs on cheating, despite not liking it, I do like to give a book a chance to change my mind; to make me believe that the cheating isn’t a horrific thing. Something Borrowed managed it, so why not this novel, too? But for me What You Don’t Know read like an almost 400 page excuse as to why exactly Helen should sleep with Graham. We learn from the off Helen is indecisive and boy was that evident throughout the novel. I mean, we’re consistently told Helen needs to contact Graham, needs to keep emailing/texting/seeing him, but for most of the novel nothing actually happens. Nothing. Helen doesn’t initiate anything physical, nor does Graham, but the innuendo is there. It’s in the air. Every time they meet, it seemed inevitable it would turn physical and for me there just wasn’t a good enough reason for it. Helen’s life was brilliant; her husband Alex was pretty much a brilliant husband (except for – shock horror! – being absorbed in football) and Helen’s kids were sweet. I suppose that’s the point, though. That despite Helen’s perfect-seeming life, she was still wanting more. But for me it just came across as selfish. She quite happily lied to Alex and then because he got a new co-star in the TV show he worked on, the beautiful Venetia Taylor, Helen became convinced Alex was cheating. I mean, come on! It’s like what Jeremy Kyle says: The one who accuses of the cheating is normally the one doing it in the first place.
I found it hard to like Helen. I reckon I’d have liked her more if the novel was written from her point of view. But it wasn’t. It was written in third-person, meaning we didn’t really get a good enough glimpse of Helen or her life to understand her wanting to cheat, to understand why she’d want to screw up her happy life for a fat, balding man. She just seemed terribly selfish, terribly self-involved and honestly, I just wanted to punch her. None of the other characters were much better. I didn’t like Graham, I didn’t like the way he just brushed aside the fact Helen was married, how he was willing to let her cheat if she decided to. To me, it was callous and the whole sordid thing between Helen and Graham was so poorly executed that I always felt uncomfortable whenever they had a meeting or a phone call or an email exchange. The only character I even remotely cared for was Alex. Can you imagine if this novel was done the other way around? If it were Alex rather than Helen who was contemplating an affair? He’d be lambasted, but as it was poor Alex was trampled all over. He trusted his wife implicitly and it made me sad. She didn’t deserve him. And all her tiny little justifications about him cheating with Venetia Taylor (she could have just asked, frankly, if she was that insecure), about how she hated the way he got involved in football… It all seemed like cheap attempts for us to not like Alex. But I did, I liked him. It was Helen and Graham I didn’t like.
The novel had potential, by the bucketload but it was very poorly executed. All of it was just… sad. The ending came rather abruptly and although I was glad to finish the novel, I didn’t feel as if I’d finished the novel, I didn’t feel as if it was a satisfying ending. The book is also let down by poor editing, with words spelled incorrectly and then a big whopper of an error on pg17 and then pg107. On pg17 we learn that Helen met Alex when she was walking home from going swimming and he knocked her over on his bike. Here’s the sentence: “As she had stepped out to cross the road that led to Heath, she was vaguely aware of a man on a bicycle speeding around the corner.” Then on pg107 there’s this line about how she and Alex went on a first date: “After she’d recovered from the shock of coming off her bike and being taken home by an ambulance…” Helen wasn’t on a bike when she met Alex, she was walking and Alex knocked her over on his bike. It’s inexcusable that small errors like this slip through the cracks, I don’t even look for the errors, I was just reading it as I do and the line on pg107 popped out at me and I remembered that Helen had been walking when she met Alex, that there was no mention of her cycling to or from the pool she was swimming at. It’s embarrassing, frankly. So many people read a book before it’s published: editors, proof readers, copy-editors, the author, crit partners… What the hell do they all do? I wanted to like What You Don’t Know, it has a beautiful cover and the synopsis was interesting, but it was so poorly executed. I didn’t care what happened to the characters (bar Alex) and I just lost interest as Helen dilly-dallied over her life.