There are very few books written
entirely as a monologue. In fact, I can think of just one other, The Reluctant
Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamed. No doubt there are other examples, but it’s fair
to say that it is rare. Whereas the Reluctant Fundamentalist has the narrator
sitting in a cafe in Lahore, telling his story to a lone American, You Don’t
Know Me has the narrator addressing a whole court room. For the entire
narrative of this novel is a defendant – having sacked his barrister at the end
of his trial for murder – standing up and delivering his own closing speech.
Our narrator is an inner-city
young black man, portrayed by the prosecution as being a gang member. He stands
accused of gunning down a man in the street. The evidence the prosecution has
marshalled appears damning: mobile phone cell sites put him in the locale at
the same time the victim was shot, he was seen arguing with the victim days
before, upon arrest a Baikal handgun was found in his flat, gunshot residue was
found on his hands and clothes, finally, a large sum of money was found in a
bag in his kitchen.
You Don’t Know Me starts off with
our narrator explaining why he sacked his barrister, why against his brief’s
advice, he has decided not only to deliver his own closing speech, but to tell
the jury what he claims to be the whole truth, leaving out nothing. He warns the
jury that some of what he is about to tell them will not be flattering, that
rather than portray him in a good light, it will damn him. But, and here’s the
crux, if the jury – and by extension us, the reader – will just bear with him,
his innocence of the murder he stands accused of will become apparent.
And so, our narrator launches
upon his explanation. He starts by going through the evidence ranged against
him, rebutting it and giving alternative explanations, but as he progresses he
can’t help but get side-tracked down narrative alleyways of explanation. What
results is a fascinating tale of a young man’s existence on the periphery of
gang life in modern urban Britain. As he tells it, slowly, inexorably, he’s
sucked into the orbit of vicious gangsters and organised crime bosses, a state
of affairs that leads to beatings, shoot outs and dead bodies.
Imran Mahmood, the author of You
Don’t Know Me, is a barrister practising in criminal law. He has defended many
a defendant accused of being in gangs and having committed serious crimes. He
says that he was motivated to write You Don’t Know Me to explore these issues
and how young men get pulled into such a life. To my mind he’s done this
admirably and I felt real empathy for someone who in the real world it would be
all too easy to demonise. How many times does one open a newspaper, read the
latest court reports of an offender sent to prison for stabbing or shooting somebody,
dismiss them as evil, criminal scum? At no point does Mahmood glorify these
crimes, but he does humanise the offender, show that often they are victims in
their own right.
You Don’t Know Me is not some
social justice rant however. While forcing the reader to confront some thorny
social issues, it is also a damn fine read, a whodunit almost. A great aspect
of this book is that the verdict is not given at the end, rather, we the reader
are the jury and it is up to us to conclude in our own minds whether he is
guilty or not.
The apotheosis of this comes with
the final twist at the end. I won’t give away spoilers, but at first this
strained credibility for me, had me thinking the narrator had gone too far. But
then he says to the jury – us, the readers – strange things happen in life, there
are deaths which appear to be the result of conspiracies, and is it too much of
a stretch that he is the victim of another? Immediately my mind turned to the
deaths of Dr David Kelly, Alexander Litvinenko, even famous assassinations like
those of John F Kennedy and I thought perhaps I should give the narrator the
benefit of the doubt.
I won’t say whether I judged our defendant-narrator
guilty or not guilty once I had read the final page. What I will say is that
anyone reading this review who hasn’t read You Don’t Know Me should read it and
judge for themselves!
Brilliant and original, this is a
definite 5 star read!
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