Blog Tour - The Well Deceived by Isaac Kuhnberg

On Wednesday, The Well Deceived blog tour visited my blog and Isaac Kuhnberg shared his author inspirations with us ( see here ) Today, the tour is back and here is my review. 

Summary:
A thought-provoking mystery in turns comic and disturbing, set in a country that resembles England in the 1950s, with one crucial difference. No women.


William Riddle is a scholar at Bune, the ancient public school where the sons of Anglia’s first families are prepared for a leading role in society. His first few weeks are a miserable round of bullying and abuse, until he makes a friend: Paul Purkis, son of a government minister. Together they create a grotesque private world, known as Malcaster, populated by criminals and deviants, as an outlet for their contempt for the school and its staff.


Overnight William’s world collapses. He is called into the headmaster’s office and told that his scientist father has committed an unspecified act of treason. William is hauled off to a detention centre to be interrogated. Escaping, he finds refuge in the louche sub-culture of the capital city, and comes to learn that everything he has ever been taught is a complete fabrication.

My review:
The Well Deceived takes place in a country called Anglia, which is like a distorted mirror image of England. The similarities are there, however, one vital difference is the complete absence of women. 

Our protagonist, William Riddle, walks us through his story. We see everything through his eyes, the eyes of an intelligent, yet naive teenage boy. From his early days growing up in a  nursery in Alba ( Scotland, in this alternate world ) to his fall from grace from the prestigious Bune College. 

At this point, I think I should include a trigger warning. William is abused during his school days and the scenes where he describes the abuse and refers to the Bunian Code and the acceptance and at times encouragement of this abuse by the masters, is incredibly distressing. 

As we are seeing this world through William's eyes, we only find out what he can tell us. His experience of The First Union, which is an almost cult like practise that teenage boys endure if they are deemed worthy, leaves us with more questions than answers. What exactly happens and why, is alluded to, but left for the reader to come to their own conclusion. 

When William's father is arrested for committing a crime ( we don't find out what this is until the very end of the story ) William is taken to a mental institution, where he is interrogated. He escapes and my favourite part of the story begins. At this point I will add that William does not make it easy for him to like us, he is pretentious, stubborn, and often angry, still, what teenage boy isn't guilty of behaving in an antagonistic way at times. Despite all this, I cared about him, I wanted him to be safe, and felt his pain as he stumbled upon some of life's harsher truths. I hoped as he faced one dilemma after another, that around the next corner he would find his happy ever after, or at least encounter a genuine friend who would help him. 

Whilst on the run from the authorities and trying to find his father, William is befriended by a journalist, and so we are introduced in more detail to the politics of this extraordinary and terrifying world. We have the ruling Pragmatic party ( akin to the Tories ) and the opposition parties, the Proles, the Plebs and the Worker's Party. William witnesses acts of violence as he travels the country with Mark during the lead up to a general election and realises the truth, that the rich will do anything to keep hold of power, even if that means killing large  numbers of innocent people and using the media to subvert the truth. 

As we see William struggling both to survive and to make sense of the world he lives in, we are taken to some very dark places. Despite the many distraction on the way, he continues to search for his father, and as we reach the final pages of the book ( after a crazy car ride in which a nemesis from the earliest chapters returns ) we become aware of the fact that Isaac Kuhnberg is isn't going to tie everything up in a neat bow. He is going to leave us wondering whether it isn't just the inhabitants of Anglia who are well deceived, but maybe it's us, the reader too. In the words of the author, the story is a mystery that poses only questions, many of them unanswerable. 

The Well Deceived is an unusual, intriguing novel that takes the reader on an uncomfortable journey, and makes us think, makes us question, makes us WANT to question and search for the truth. 



Information about the Book
Title: The Well Deceived
Author: Isaac Kuhnberg
Release Date: 15th May 2017
Genre: Dystopian
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Format: Paperback

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                           The Well Deceived by Isaac Kuhnberg - blog tour 

The Well Deceived blog tour is visiting today, and I have the pleasure of sharing with you a guest post written by the author Isaac Kuhnberg. 


My author inspirations


Children’s Books

I can still remember the thrill of the moment in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It when the Psammead – a magical creature, part monkey and part snail – emerges from the dirty sandpit and starts to talk. For me E Nesbit was a kind of substitute mother, funny, infinitely understanding, and full of practical wisdom. Magic in children’s books is too often used as a cheat, an easy way of getting out of scrapes. Nesbit’s brand of magic is one you can believe in: the sort that gets you into trouble, rather than out of it. Precisely when her child heroes most need its services, it turns out to be unavailable, forcing them to fall back on such worldly resources as courage, kindness and luck.


My love of children’s fiction did not end with childhood. When my children were small I read to them every night: classics like E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter and C.S. Lewis and The Hobbit, together with authors I was discovering for the first time like Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl. I also read them Enid Blyton’s Adventure series, which had been my favourite reading before I discovered E Nesbit. The poor reputation of Blyton’s books among teachers doesn’t detract from their immense readability. Watching my children’s reactions to these and others of the books I read them was a profoundly useful lesson in what works, not just in children’s fiction but in writing in general.


Science Fiction

My childhood love of magic steered me as a teenager to the related pleasures of science fiction. The first novel I read in this genre was John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. David Strorm, the narrator of this greatly under-appreciated book, is a telepath, who tells of a childhood in a post-apocalyptic world where mutants are considered blasphemies and either sterilized or sent into exile. The theme and narrative strategy have clear parallels to those of The Well Deceived. David Strorm, I have just realised, is a character who exists somewhere in the background of my own protagonists, and once I started writing novels myself I invariably began them in the first person. This approach rarely fails to grip me – it is, for example, the one used in Kaiso Ishiguro’s heart-breaking dystopian novel Never Let Me Go, another major influence on The Well Deceived.



At some point my father – another science-fiction fan – introduced me to Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World, two opposing but equally seminal visions of the future. Before long I was totally hooked, and because I could never find enough science-fiction in the local public library, my father took me several times to a second-hand bookshop in Portsmouth which specialized in the genre. The shop was presided over by a tall bald silent figure, rather similar in appearance and manner to my father. One day to our enormous disappointment we found it closed. We asked after the bookseller in the shop next door, and a woman told us, with a twirly gesture of the fingers, that he had been ‘taken away.’ The association of science fiction and madness persists to this day.



Puzzles

Many of the books that most appeal to me are in one way or another puzzles: three-dimensional constructs created from different viewpoints, where the reader has to distinguish truth from lies, and reality from illusion. Most readers come across these in the form of the detective story, or spy fictions like the novels of John le Carré, but the best puzzles, like Vladimir Nabokov’s marvelous Pale Fire, have a tragic emotional truth at their heart.


Classics

Favourite authors among the literary classics include Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, E.M. Forster Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, but these have had very little direct influence on the things I write. What I particularly enjoy is reading accounts of past societies by novelists who lived during the period they write about, and noting their relevance to the social issues that interest me. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James is a particular favourite. There are other books which mainly interest me from a technical point of view, like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which has taught me a great deal about the possibilities of first person narrative.


Stephen King

I also enjoy a lot of popular fiction: thrillers, crime fiction, horror. Such books are popular for a reason: as well as being immensely readable, they have a direct line to the collective unconscious of contemporary society. The novels and short stories of Stephen King were once regarded as rubbish, but lately critics have woken up to their qualities. In terms of
quality they are incredibly patchy, and the writing is often lurid and lazy, but the best of them – Christine, The Shining, 11/22/63, and the great bulk of the short stories – have a visceral impact that stays with you long after you have laid the book to rest. King is a news buff, which ensures that the ideas he explores are always current; he is also a master at projecting himself into the dark heart of any given situation. After a particularly horrible train crash, I read in a news report that the scene of the accident was punctuated by the unanswered ringing of the victims’ mobiles. My youngest son (also a King fan) pointed out that this was a detail only Stephen King could have dreamed up.


Thank you to author Isaac Kuhnberg for sharing his inspirations with us, and to Faye Rogers for including me in the blog tour for this thought-provoking mystery! 

The blog tour will be returning on Monday, when I will share my review of The Well Deceived with you. 



Information about the Book

Title: The Well Deceived
Author: Isaac Kuhnberg
Release Date: 15th May 2017
Genre: Dystopian
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Format: Paperback