Stalker’s insight

There is growing anxiety about the decline of the privacy in a high-tech era have helped creepy, obsessive persistent stalkers a boost.

Leo Benedictus’s innovative approaches and follows the progression of a protagonist from mild sociopathy to deadly jeopardy. Once a target is selected he uses every means available from voyeuristic peeping to electronic surveillance avoiding face-to-face meetings. The prey in Consent is management consultant Frances, who is suspended from her job, after an unspecified email complaint. However, she does not realise she is being stalked, as her stalker is prepared to take extreme measures against those around her. The reader is led to believe that nothing can be done to protect her. When the stalker introduces himself to the reader “You’re being very patient, you want the nitty-gritty and you’re right…. Me. Who am I? The word that many would apply to me would be a stalker, but applying does not make it so. I’d say instead that I practise people studies.”

The book is intellectually hyperactive, and Benedictus facilitate stalking woman by furnishing his man with a legacy through which he conveniently becomes a millionaire over 11 times and likes to chat to the reader and explain himself, to show off, to offload.

“She lies on her side. Her face is half-hidden by her hair, which is heavy and lustrous. As I watch, her sleeping finger hooks it back behind an ear. She chews the air and exhales, settling. I wonder what she’s dreaming about. Perhaps it’s dreams of her girlhood, of growing up fatherless but in secure circumstances in a small town. Or of spending her young years well enough liked at school and known for brains, mostly a historian, then shaking the reputation off at University. After University I know that she was sharper with herself and found a well-paid job, and it turned out that money suited her. From her stalky adolescence, glamour came.”

Consent by Leo Benedictus Faber £12.99, 240 pages