I read Liar by Justine Larbalestier just recently. It's a book I'd been looking forward to, because I like unreliable narrators and books that play with reader expectations. But I ended up not really liking it, and I wanted to talk about that, from a narrative perspective.

The following is going to contain huge spoilers for Liar, plus spoilers for Code Name Verity and the first of Karin Lowachee's Warchild novels. I'll cover up those latter spoilers with span text, so you can skip them if you want to remain unspoiled for those books.

I like unreliable narrators ... but only up to a point, apparently. It all ties into my love for being surprised. I like to unravel a plot like a puzzle. The above novels are mentioned because both of them use the unreliable-narrator trope in a way that worked very well for me. (Spoilers follow) In both cases, there's the neat little snap of "... oh!" when you realize something you thought was true actually isn't. Code Name Verity plays with that from the very beginning (the main character is writing out information for her torturers, so obviously she is lying about some of it; teasing out the lies from the truth is half the fun), whereas Warchild seems to be a straightforward first-person narration until you start to get the dawning realization, about 2/3 of the way through, that there's a major game-changer the narrator hasn't told you about because he doesn't consciously remember it himself -- or, at least, is repressing as hard as he can. (The first time I read the book, I wondered why he was so incredibly messed up from what appears to have been a fairly untraumatic captivity, all things considered ... until you start to get the clues later in the book that the events we "witnessed" earlier in the book, filtered through his POV, had actually been heavily edited because he was blocking a lot of it. What you got was the account of his captivity with all the rape and abuse edited out.)

Warchild plays with the conceit that you're "actually seeing" what's happening when you're looking through a first-person narrator's eyes (but you're actually only witnessing the events he allows himself to consciously think about), whereas Code Name Verity tells you right up front that the narrator is lying to you, and why, and then lets you figure out what parts of it are actually true. (I speculated in the beginning that the two women she talks about are really just herself, split for narrative purposes into two people. This was obviously not the case. But right up to the end, you keep catching little things that she changed for her captors' benefit -- there's a neat "gotcha!" with the discovery near the end of the book that one character who had been presented in a wholly unsympathetic light in Verity's account of her torture was actually helping her ... but she couldn't mention it in the "official" account that she was writing, because then she would have given that person away.)

In both cases, you're given the clues to what actually happened, the things the narrator's not telling you, and by the end you have a pretty clear picture of actual events.

Liar ... doesn't do that. I enjoyed it most of the way through, but near the end I realized that there was no way to tell what was real and what wasn't, and the author was never going to tell you, or give you the clues to figure it out yourself. You can kinda guess at some things (the werewolf thing is almost certainly not real, which I'd guessed from the beginning), but by the end, the entire sequence of events and the existence of all the other characters is up in the air. Did any of the people we read about actually exist? Did the main character kill someone, or a lot of people? Is Micah a boy or a girl? Is Micah insane? Drugged? In prison? You can infer that most of what she told you is untrue, possibly all of it, but there's no way whatsoever to be sure how much of what you just read is a delusional fantasy about people who don't actually exist. (All of it? Some of it? Is the boy in the park real? What about her upstate relatives? What about her classmates? Did she kill her brother and parents? Is she completely harmless and just messing with you? YOU SIMPLY DON'T KNOW.)

For all that we know at the end, every single event in the book and every other character might have been invented by the narrator. But there's no "reality check" to give you any idea of whether or not that's true.

And ... that's not fun. At least it wasn't fun for me. If anything is possible, then none of it actually matters.

Though I do wonder if some of it might not have to do with genre expectations. I will read basically anything, but I've noticed one thing that's different about most "literary" fiction from genre fiction is that it tends to be much more open-ended. Literary stories feel unfinished to me, like the author stopped a couple chapters short of the actual ending. I expect that for someone who likes that and is used to that, it probably feels as if genre novels are too pat and tie everything up too neatly. I wonder if some of my frustration with Liar is because I was expecting to be given more clues or more of an outside reality check than I was.

But you can still tie up something, darn it.

Has anyone else read it? What did you think? Do you have a different take on the book's reality-to-unreality ratio than I did?