Rogue Male

⚖The case for it

Household narrates from inside the hunted man rather than the hunter, which readers call a rare and disorienting angle for a chase. The best of it is the fieldcraft: a big-game hunter turning his own trade on himself, going to ground in the English countryside and digging a den to live in like an animal. The voice is a notebook written in hiding, exact about physical fact and evasive about feeling. The interrogation with his chief pursuer is the passage readers name. Under two hundred pages, finished in a night. “Bond before James Bond existed.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The deadpan reporting undercuts the danger for a fair number of readers, too matter-of-fact to feel like a man being hunted. The narrator’s reserve keeps them at a distance from him entirely. The procedural stretches on terrain and tools alternate with sudden action rather than building, and the period vocabulary breaks immersion, one reader stumbling over “this alien thing consisting of slates, gables and copings.” The mechanics that force the final confrontation are “extremely contrived.” Some say it “doesn’t really feel like a story. It’s more of an essay,” and one critic calls the whole “too dated and ludicrous.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings