The Chameleon's Shadow

...Because I have to say I really liked this novel, whereas most of my fellow reviewers seem to have some (no doubt justified) problems with it. So let me quickly explain what I liked: I thought the characters and their emotional state were very well handled. The anger that Charles feels after being blown up in Iraq strikes me as psychologically extremely close to reality. The isolation and personality crisis he suffers are sensitively handled. Of course you could say fair enough but I wanted to read a thriller not a post-traumatic information leaflet. To me, though, the menace, the strange people he has dealings with, the not-knowing which side you're meant to be on, add greatly to the suspense. So in my books, this is a great novel which I think deserves a great many readers.

A mixed bag (1/1 people found this helpful)

When Minette Walters first began her writing career, she produced several excellent novels, particularly 'The Sculptress', but since then she has never quite lived up to that early promise. Her later work has varied in quality from quite good ('The Dark Room') to pretty awful ('The Breaker', 'Acid Row'). Her latest, 'The Chameleon's Shadow', is a bit of a mixed bag; it's definitely an improvement on her previous book, 'The Devil's Feather' and it certainly kept me interested until the end (despite the fact that the killer is pretty obvious from early on), but a number of annoyances meant I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped.

Lt. Charles Ackland is the central figure in the book, a soldier injured in Iraq who has become prey to unbearable headaches and sudden explosions of temper which are most often directed towards women. Ms Walters attempts to keep us guessing about his true nature, showing his violent side and then revealing some of his difficult history, with which she clearly intends to engage our sympathy. The problem is that she makes Ackland so unpleasant early on - the man is a misogynist, a racist and a rapist - that even after learning what circumstances lay behind his behaviour I found it impossible to sympathise with him. Walters places a great deal of emphasis on his 'macho' qualities - physical strength, a high pain threshold, having 'guts' etc. - but none of these supposedly positive traits excuse the fact that he makes a vicious racist attack early on in the novel, and he physically assaults several women throughout the story (some of them aren't exactly likeable characters, but that's no excuse). Yet suddenly we are supposed to see him as an object of sympathy. Others, including the police, are always making allowances for him, but I found him impossible to like or care about.

Jackson, the female GP and part-time body-builder (I kid you not) is the other main character, and while she is certainly more interesting and appealing than Ackland, she's not very credible. I mean, how many body-building doctors do you know? And how many doctors would call a teenage patient "retard" to their face, no matter how irritating that patent was?

Another big problem with chracterisation is one that Minette Walters often falls foul of: her patronising and offensive depictions of the working classes. Ms. Walters must draw her knowledge of ordinary Londoners from the more hysterical aspects of Eastenders. Her working-class characters are usually foul-mouthed bigots with criminal tendancies, and their dialogue is completely unconvincing, being a combination of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and a particularly bad script from The Bill. It makes me laugh in disbelief when reviewers call Ms Walters a 'gritty' writer, but then they probably have as little experience of the world she's describing as she does herself. She should really stick to the comfortable, middle-class world she inhabits as a setting.

I realise it sounds as if I absolutely hated this book, but that's not true at all. The simple fact is that despite all these annoyances it's still an engrossing page-turner. It's just a shame about the problems, because it could have been a great crime novel without them. I'll still be picking up Ms Walters' next book - there's no doubt she knows how to tell a story and she's a good writer when she's covering familiar ground. Hopefully one day she'll produce something to equal her early work; we can but hope.

Ending not as good as what preceded it (0/0 people found this helpful)

Minette Walters' newest psychological suspense novel focuses on the effects of war, not on those who inhabit the country of warfare, but rather on those who fight the wars, and the horrendous injuries they sustain that affect every aspect of their lives, both physically and psychologically. The protagonist is British lieutenant Charles Acland, 26 years old, home from Iraq with devastating head injuries, including loss of sight in one eye and total disfigurement of that side of his face, tinnitus, and migraine headaches. Even worse are the resultant personality changes: suspicion of those around him almost to the point of paranoia; outbursts of uncontrolled anger ["red mist" is a recurring phrase]; distrust of nearly everyone, especially women; inability to tolerate being touched - whether all this is the result of post-traumatic guilt over the death of two of the men under him in the same attack or what is termed "the prolonged destruction of a personality," or something else entirely, is unclear. The effects of traumatic brain injury and subsequent antisocial behavior are explored.

When several men in the London area are attacked and beaten to death over a period of several months, and it appears that it is the work of one man, Acland falls under suspicion. It is unclear to the police, and the reader, whether or not he is in fact the attacker. He unwillingly turns for aid to a woman whose lesbian partner runs a bar in which he has started a fight, a doctor called merely "Jackson." A fascinating creation, she is variously described as being "the size of a whale" and "over six feet...this wide and looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger," but she earns Acland's grudging respect and becomes his savior, his psychiatrist [though that is not her area of medical specialization] and, ultimately, his friend..

The title derives from (1) Acland being described as, chameleon-like, projecting "different images of himself to different people," and (2) the Jungian definition of a "shadow" as "the dark aspect of personality formed by those fears and unpleasant emotions which, being rejected by the self or persona of which an individual is conscious, exist in the personal unconscious." The view is a disturbing one. I must admit that I couldn't help but feel that the resolution was somehow less compelling than that which had preceded it. Nonetheless, Ms. Walters has again written a gripping and suspenseful novel.

Very enjoyable (0/0 people found this helpful)

I enjoyed this very much and loved the characters of Acland and Jackson so that I found myself, at the end of the novel, wondering what would happen to them.

The Chameleon's Shadow (0/0 people found this helpful)

A good book,but certainly not one of Minette Walters best.I think some of the previous comments were a bit off the mark.I'm sure must people faced with severe facial deformitity,migraine and the lose of their proffesion would speak more like a digruntled forty year old than a twenty-six year old!If you have never read Walters before I would not reccommend starting with this one it is not as gripping as any of her previous novels.

Minette Walters

Reader Reviews:

I seem to be in a minority... (1/1 people found this helpful)

A mixed bag (1/1 people found this helpful)

Ending not as good as what preceded it (0/0 people found this helpful)

Very enjoyable (0/0 people found this helpful)

The Chameleon's Shadow (0/0 people found this helpful)

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