There is a whole sub-genre of novels about stalking, out there in the land where literary criticism fears to tread. Straddling the realms of both crime and erotica, you can see why it’s such rich territory for popular fiction. With a handful of notable exceptions, though – Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy, James Lasdun’s fascinating but morally wonky Give Me Everything You Have, Patricia Highsmith (of course) – few serious authors have taken on the subject. Now two have arrived at once, both ostensibly thrillers, but each more nuanced and interesting than you might expect.
After a surprise bequest makes him fabulously rich, the unnamed narrator of Leo Benedictus’s Consent decides to spend his time stalking women. “I do secretly follow strangers on the street,” he says in his creepily affectless voice. “I wait outside their houses and I listen to their conversations, if I can.” The victims respond in different ways to the narrator’s intrusions, but behind each encounter is the sense that women have been living with the reality that “being pestered for sex was just the burden that a woman carried until she carried children”.
Like Benedictus’s excellent debut, The Afterparty (2011), this is a novel that plays with the conventions of the form, asking the reader to consider his or her place in the forming of the narrative. With great subtlety and wit, Benedictus shows us how close our own relentless curiosity about the lives of the characters in the book is to the deranged obsessions of the narrator. The unexamined compacts that form between author and reader are held up for inspection, and we see new and unsettling strangeness in the everyday. It all makes for an unusual and enormously compelling novel.
Like Lasdun, Dirk Kurbjuweit was the victim of a real-life stalker. While Lasdun wrote a memoir of the ordeal (in which your sympathies never fall entirely on the victim’s side), Kurbjuweit, a German journalist, has used his experiences as the inspiration for a novel. Translated by the sure-footed Imogen Taylor, Fear has already seen huge success on the continent. The reading experience is a strange one, particularly if you know the basic details of the real-life case. You’re constantly on the lookout for the faultline between truth and fiction, always sensitised to the gap between Kurbjuweit and his fictional stand-in, Randolph Tiefenthaler.
Unhappily married to the doughty Rebecca, with two young children, Tiefenthaler initially sees his downstairs neighbour, Dieter Tiberius, as nothing more than an unhappy loner.
Then Tiberius accuses the Tiefenthalers of abusing their children, and the plot ratchets up to an almost unbearable pitch.
The novel asks what happens when those support systems that we presume underpin our society fail us. Tiberius is wonderfully sinister, the denouement just about credible. You’ll never see your neighbours in the same light again.
• Consent by Leo Benedictus is published by Faber and Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit by Orion, both at £12.99. To order a copy of either for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
