JP POMARE Tell Me Lies. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
The latest thriller from award-winner JP Pomare continues his fascination with psychological manipulation.
Early one morning at Melbourne’s Southbank station, psychologist Margot Scott approaches a man from behind, hesitating as she waits for the approaching train.
It’s loud now, so loud he doesn’t hear her striding forward. The man turns back, raises his hands in defense, but half a second too late. She shoves him with all of her strength. The train is gliding into the station. His weight shifts; a gasp. Then he’s falling. His body thuds against the concrete and rails. The train driver doesn’t have time to apply the brakes; there is no time to do anything.
This scene in the prologue, ripped from the climax of Tell Me Lies, provides one of the story’s driving questions – who is the man, and what has led a woman with a successful career and a happy marriage to kill him?
The other question, of course, is who is lying, and to whom.
Originally published as an Audible Original, JP Pomare’s third book has now been released in print and ebook. He won the 2019 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel for his debut, Call Me Evie, which explored psychological manipulation and its effects. His next book, In the Clearing, released in early 2020, expanded this exploration through a fictionalisation of the Australian cult The Family.
In Tell Me Lies, Pomare takes a fresh angle on psychological manipulation. The first of its three parts opens with a quote from American journalist HL Mencken: ‘It is hard to believe that a man is telling you the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.’
Set in present-day Melbourne and narrated by Margot, the psychologist, the story opens a month before the murder at Southbank station. Margot lives with her husband and two children, online gaming addict Evan and 17-year-old July, who’s recently gone through her first bad break-up and is now throwing herself into a new relationship. Margot is aware of the challenges her children are facing, but despite her psychological training, struggles to help them.
Her current research focuses on an antisocial personality disorder characterised by a disregard for other people. At her South Yarra office, her clients include:
… a few depressed housewives, blondes with menopause bobs more in love with their spoodles than their husbands, a few lonely self-absorbed bachelors, one woman who once a week needs to talk away her affair guilt. Then there are the borderlines: the narcissists, the addicts – usually gambling, cocaine, sex or social media, which bring a whole host of other conditions along with them.
A few patients are more interesting, however, including Cormac, a handsome young man who Margot takes on as a favour to a friend. Cormac has recently been forced to leave university after plagiarism violations, but it’s the traumatic events of his childhood in Ireland that most intrigue his new psychologist.
Cormac presents an interesting challenge for Margot, asking about her personal life instead of discussing his own. During their sessions, she notes:
If I’m asking the questions, I’m in control of the exchange and some people don’t like that. Type A personalities need control as they feared being manipulated. When cornered, they might ask their own questions to pry control back.
We meet other patients as well. A young woman named Xanthe presents with self-harm, anxiety and spectrophobia, a fear of mirrors. Joe, a man whose work as a content moderator on a social media platform involves reviewing graphic images, has begun having violent nightmares.
Margot seems to have an enviable life – until an act of violence destroys her home and endangers her family, throwing her professional and personal life into chaos.
Interspersed throughout the narrative are extracts from a criminal trial, exchanges between a prosecutor and a witness. The witness reads personal diary extracts, written by one of Margot’s clients, which cast her in an increasingly questionable light.
Tell Me Lies has an intricately woven and tightly paced plot that moves faster even than Pomare’s previous novels. It features his signature final twist in the closing pages, as well as his evocative writing style. His descriptions are especially precise in phrases such as ‘a big man with a surprisingly small voice, the voice of a wind instrument’ and ‘the spaghetti straps of her top are dark like the lines dividing a doll’s limbs’.
What makes Pomare’s novels especially powerful is the blurring of ethical lines, spurred by revelations that come deep into the story and force re-evaluations of each character’s motives. This is true for Tell Me Lies as much as for his previous novels, further establishing his reputation as a master of the genre.
JP Pomare Tell Me Lies Hachette Australia 2020 PB 272pp $24.99
Ashley Kalagian Blunt is the author of My Name is Revenge, a finalist in the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. Her writing also appears in the Griffith Review, Sydney Review of Books, The Australian, the Big Issue, and Kill Your Darlings. Her most recent book is the memoir How to be Australian (you can read an extract here). Find her at ashleykalagianblunt.com
You can buy Tell Me Lies from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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