If We Were Villains

This is a bit of a hard book to rate. Technically, it had some flaws that I couldn't ignore with its pacing, structure, etc. and the characters were generally not likeable, but... despite these I enjoyed it, and certainly more than I expected to at the beginning. If you go into this one throwing realism out of the window and expecting almost a sort of modern Shakespearean drama with all its attendant wild and crazy happenings, you might end up enjoying this one.

Our narrator and protagonist, Oliver Marks, has just been released from prison where he had served 10 years for murder. As he walks out of prison, the sympathetic detective who had arrested him in the first place asks him to tell him the real story of what happened. Oliver reminisces about his time in the Dellecher School a decade ago, and the group of 7 theatre students that he had been intimately part of. Filippa, Wren, Alexander, Richard, James, Meredith, and himself, and how their group, once so close together, slowly came to a climax of tragedy and heartbreak before falling apart.

When I first started this book, I was a little annoyed by how stupid pretentious these students were. They ate, lived, and breathed Shakespeare, to the point of inserting random quotations into their everyday speech when it fit the occasion. It felt like a lite version of The Secret History, a book which I DNFed about a third through and didn't enjoy very much, so I was pretty nervous and apprehensive at the beginning of this one when it gave me a lot of TSH vibes. Luckily though, this eased as the book went on. I'm not sure if I just got used to it or because the drama between the students were a bit more compelling and engaging, or the characters were more interesting to read about. Whatever the case, there was certainly a compulsion for me to keep reading and I finished probably the last 75% of the book at one shot, unable to put it down because I wanted to know what happened.

There are two things to keep in mind here that might make the book go down easier. Firstly, like what present-day Oliver mentions in one of the prologues, on hindsight Dellecher felt more like a cult than a school. It's not obvious when you're reading about it from the perspective of fourth-year-student Oliver, but then again cults never are that obvious when you're in the thick of it. It does also explain some of the more over-the-top moments where it almost felt like Oliver would rather die than leave Dellecher, and would certainly sacrifice any number of his family members to stay. It explains why these ostensibly well-educated, intelligent, and sensitive young adults are willing to put up with so much crap in their time at Dellecher, apparently to become better at their craft of acting.

Secondly, this book is a homage and a love letter to Shakespearean plays, particularly tragic dramas. It's not aiming for realism here. A lot of events that happen, especially in the last 25% are so incredibly unrealistic that I find it pretty clear that the author was deliberately steering away from realism and really indulging in that wild, fantastic endings that Shakespeare is famous for. It's basically a modern-day Shakespearean soap opera. This book demands suspension of disbelief In the same way that one would do so when watching soap operas. If you can get past that, you might actually enjoy it.

Thoughts on the ending: I had actually wondered that perhaps Oliver had been convicted for the the murder of someone else and not Richard, and that we're going to see him murder James at the end, but I was wrong. Some people thought the ending was a little shoehorned in with Oliver and James being gay, but I would disagree with that. There have always been little hints and stuff through the book where you might wonder if you were imagining things and thinking too much, or if you were meant to think that there was something between the two. I did really enjoy the fact that this was building up in the background all along and it finally emerged at the end. I do kinda think that James's possibly faking his own death at the end was a bit unnecessary, but it's just about as unnecessary as, say, a faked-death in Romeo & Juliet. I think the just-missed opportunity at a HEA and the OTT sacrifice from Oliver was Rio paying homage to all these tragic plays where everyone winds up accidentally dead or maligned some way or other.