The Fury
(Review, Chapter Summary & Spoilers)

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Fury by Alex Michaelides, a layered five-act mystery-thriller about a former movie star who invites her friends and family to a getaway on a private Greek island.

Synopsis

In The Fury by Alex Michaelides, Lana Farrar is a retired beloved movie star who invites her friends to come with her and her family on a getaway to a private Greek island that she was once gifted by her former husband.

The island is idyllic and serene, but as fierce Aegean winds blow through -- known as to menos, or "the fury" -- tragedy strikes. A body is found lying in a pool of blood.

With the police unable to reach the island until morning due to the winds, the seven people on the island look to each other to try to figure out who the killer might be...

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Book Review

The Fury by Alex Michaelides came out in January, a standalone book that takes place in the same world as his previous mystery-thrillers, The Silent Patient and The Maidens. There’s brief mentions of the characters from his previous books, but definitely no need to have read either of them to get into this one.

The reviews of The Fury have been mixed, so I was actually originally planning on skipping this.

But I went through some of the reviews the other day, and I found it curious that it sounded like people were reading two completely different books. Some people thought it was a convoluted mess, while others thought it was brilliant. I eventually decided I might as well read it and find out for myself.

The In Fury, a retired movie star plans a getaway to a private Greek island she owns, inviting a few close friends to join her and her family. But soon a body is found. With only seven people on this secluded island, it’s clear the killer won’t be able to hide for long…

The Book Structure

Michaelides’s intentions with this book were ambitious. It’s structured as a classic five-act tragedy, but with a twist. Each act in the book reveals new layers to the story and sheds a different light on previous events.

Before I get into any criticism, I really want to give him credit for trying something inventive and difficult. I don’t think this was ever going to be an easy trick to pull off, and he comes somewhat close to making it happen.

This format works … at first. In Acts I and II and III, each additional act feels not quite as clever as the book wants it to be, but it does manage to add something to the story. In Act IV, however, you can feel the story starting to strain under the weight of its conceit. The book manages to hold it together, but I was starting to doubt if there was enough payoff to justify the additional complexity in the story. This was the “is the juice still worth the squeeze?” part of my reading.

By, Act V, I had my answer. The story crumbles in the last act, and in order to add another layer, it renders so much of the rest of the book as being moot and pointless. The characters’ motivations stop making very much sense. It definitely feels more convoluted than clever by the end.

Why it Didn’t Work

In the end, I don’t think the problem was the complexity itself — I didn’t have a hard time following it, and I imagine most other people wouldn’t either. I think the problem was that in order to create complexity and add increasing layers of new information to what we’d already learned, Michaelides ends up sacrificing the story itself.

In other words, the storyline itself just isn’t compelling enough to justify wading through all these layers. And in order to add the layers, Michaelides renders pointless a lot of stuff in the previous layers and the last act doesn’t make a ton of sense. Basically, the payoff of all of this feels inconsequential at best, nonsensical at worst. And the psychological characterization of these characters is completely all over the place.

In the original, Act I iteration of the story, you’re led to believe that the characters have certain motivations and there’s certain events driving their actions. With each Act and layer, these things sort of disintegrate.

For me, in a psychological thriller, when there’s a good plot twist, there’s a feeling of stuff clicking into place as truths are revealed. In this case, it’s mostly just a continual feeling of “okay, well I guess that’s a semi-reasonable explanation”, with an ending where it’s like “okay well now it stopped making sense”.

Anyway, obviously this is hard to discuss without spoilers. If you want to read the rest of my thoughts, I’ll address them in the Questions, Ending & Explanations page.

The Writing Style

Also, I should mention that the writing style in The Fury is another issue. The novel employs the lesser used second person omniscient perspective, and it’s written in a very conversational tone with frequent asides, errant commentary and a lot of meta discussion from our narrator.

At times, it works really well. There’s one chapter where, after the body is discovered, the narrator explains what would happen if this were an Agatha Christie novel. He says that in that case, an investigator would show up and break down all the facts and question each character. I loved this because it was a great way to succinctly give a rundown of the situation — quickly establishing basic facts, each character’s alibi and what we know about their motives. But other times it feels a lot more pointless.

Problematically, the second person omniscient perspective also adds some confusion to an already all-over-the place story, since it’s not clear where he’s getting his information from. How does this omniscient thing work, are we supposed to take what he’s saying at face value or view it from the lens of his character?

Also, sometimes the conversational style gets a little tiresome. I do think that listening to the audiobook helps. The way the book is written, it works well as an audiobook.

Read it or Skip it?

As I was reading this, I could tell how hard Michaelides tried to make his layered five-act book work, and I wanted very badly to enjoy this book more than I did.

But the story and these characters really weren’t compelling enough to withstand all these layers of complexity. At some point the book became complexity for complexity’s sake and the thin storyline breaks down under its weight.

Every time I read a novel from Alex Michaelides, I end up feeling like the book is imperfect in different ways but there’s hints of cleverness that are so satisfying that it really makes it worth it to me. I felt the same way about this book, and I am still glad I read it. I just wanted for the sake of the effort that clearly went into this for the story to be more enjoyable than it was.

See The Fury on Amazon.

The Fury Audiobook Review

Narrator: Alex Jennings
Length: 8 hours 8 minutes

The book is written in such a conversational way that I think it’s almost better as an audiobook. I also think Alex Jennings does a fantastic job of narrating the book in a way that gives a lot shape and texture to the writing.

I would definitely recommend considering the audiobook if you’re interested in reading The Fury.

Hear a sample of The Fury audiobook on Libro.fm.

Ending & Explanations

See the Questions, Ending & Explanations for The Fury

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Fury