Jude Cook’s intriguing third novel, Time Being, opens with a bang. A philosophy lecturer has been shot dead through the door of a toilet stall in the humanities building at the University of London. Laura Cameron was her discipline’s answer to Brian Cox or Mary Beard, a broadcast regular, almost as renowned for her ‘eccentric, bohemian style as for her books on meta ethics and moral responsibility’.
The motive is a mystery, stumping everyone from Jack, Laura’s ‘dependable and handsome barrister husband’ to the Met’s senior investigating officer, DCI Wahid Malik. Cue shock from all concerned; all except Esther Luck, a fellow philosophy lecturer who counted Laura as a ‘dear friend’ and was also using the fifth-floor toilets at the time of Laura’s murder. ‘She was there,’ Cook informs us, twice, about his third-person narrator.
The set-up thus complete, Cook tells us why: Esther, who has ovarian cancer, had planned on being the victim. It was to have been a simple assisted suicide, ‘quick, efficient, painless’, the shot dispatched, at Esther’s request, by a former lover, Michel Vincent, a recovering heroin user who had reappeared in her life after she’d gone public with her cancer diagnosis on Facebook. With only a 20 per cent chance of recovery, despite months of gruelling treatment, Esther, who at 47 was single and childless, had wanted out. But Michel had fired at the wrong cubicle door.
What follows is Cook’s attempt to turn this implausible outcome into an intelligent thriller that uses stock philosophical theories to interrogate ethical behaviour. Thinking of Kant, Esther ponders about her position: ‘If Laura died “by accident” – an accident she had everything to do with – where does that leave her morally? How would old Immanuel have seen her?’ An unexpected cancer reprieve puts her under extra pressure to make the most of her situation. Cook’s main protagonist may be female, but her quandary straddles gender.
Time Being, which unfolds over the course of one year, offers much to admire, from lucid prose and a crash course in philosophical dictums (Esther’s ‘decision to end her life was symptomatic of her mauvaise foi, a Sartrean concept’) to a neat concluding twist. It is good to see a writer getting granular about a disease, such as ovarian cancer, which is frequently misdiagnosed. But there are mishaps, too, from a tendency to labour a point, to some stilted dialogue (‘Are you OK with the brie?’ ‘I think I’ll stick with La vache qui rit.’ ‘Just as well, as I’ve almost finished it.’).
Last year, Cook launched a new indie press, Conduit Books, to focus on male authors, but this novel offers its own proof that men are still making it to the bookshelves.
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