Island reality show takes dark, deadly twists

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This article was published 27/07/2024 (460 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There comes a moment in One Perfect Couple when the suspense becomes so excruciating that you can hardly bear to read the next sentence, yet you desperately need to know.

The dread, the cringing, the fear for the characters to whom you’ve entrusted your anguished hopes — how many authors strive to get there, how few ever truly achieve it.

You’ll know that time when it comes.

Walk into this read with the notion that it’s the umpteenth version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and you’ll be completely blown away by the audacity of Ruth Ware’s never taking readers where we expect to go.

Yes, it’s a murder mystery.

Lyla is our first-person narrator, a PhD in virology subsisting in London on one tenuous research assistant grant to the next, living with Nico, an aspiring actor and major hunk who never seems to quite get a part in a TV episode or play or commercial.

Somehow, Nico lands the pair a spot on a new reality show that’s about to film on an exclusive island somewhere off Indonesia — Lyla reluctantly goes, only to give Nico a shot at stardom.

Lyla seems to be scripted as a type, as the one contestant who looks and acts like a normal person, the only one whom you might want to know in real life.

We’ll cut to the chase: once there — electronics confiscated, grandiose promises unfulfilled — five couples learn they’ll be winnowed out, one person at a time, in humiliating fashion. The producers hope relationships will disintegrate on camera, maybe even new pairs will hook up, the cameras rolling all the while.

This is the British author’s ninth novel; her The It Girl from two years ago stands as her masterpiece, but golly, is One Perfect Couple good.

Ware almost immediately begins juxtaposing a foreboding page here and there of various so-far-surviving contestants among the 10 sending out pleading radio mayday messages: there’s been a devastating storm, people are dead, others are injured, the production crew and their boat are gone, water and food and medicine are running out.

And no one answers.

Do more people die? Well sure, that’s what happens in such books when you have a finite though dwindling group of survivors. But who, and how, and when and at whose hands? Read on, if you dare.

Ware even introduces a second chronicler who starts keeping a diary, and whose accounts are the complete opposite of what Lyla has told us — like reading two accounts of the same event, one from Donald Trump, the other from a sane, rational, decent person.

Thinking you’ve read this plot before is no help. Really, you think there must be someone else on the island with a secret hiding place? Maybe it’s like later seasons of Lost — whenever the writers ran out of ideas they simply conjured up new people on the island heretofore unnoticed.

Maybe it’s all part of the reality show. The slimy producers were miraculously capable of predicting the storm, the cameras are still operational, there’s a streaming service on the dark web that’s made the quantum leap to The Hunger Games — maybe only one contestant is meant to survive.

Come now — like Ruth Ware would stoop to plot so melodramatic, so obvious.

Keep a jug of ice water by your side as you read One Perfect Couple. A really big jug of ice water.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin is so glad that he never has to regret a single second of his life he’d want back because it was wasted watching reality shows.