Canary Wharf in wintertime can be a fairly bleak and forbidding place, never more so that in the midst of a global banking collapse – perhaps enough to make anyone a bit depressed. For Matt Freeman, protagonist of Henry Sutton’s latest novel, the place seems to have made him more than a bit down in the dumps. The book opens with Freeman acting like a spoilt city boy while returning a pair of glasses – nothing but the best for a young high flyer, cash-rich, time-poor. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that Freeman is fooling himself far more effectively than he is fooling the rest of the world.

Matt Freeman at first seems harmlessly delusional – with his constant talk of setting up business deals in North Korea, and his endless obsession with upmarket branded goods, as well as a distinctly offhand attitude to his fellow man, he is hard to like and hard to take. He becomes harder still to tolerate when his attitude to women, his pervasive fantasy life, begins to emerge. Matt Freeman has issues with women – he can barely seem to tolerate his girlfriend, and he fantasises about several of his neighbours, spying on them from the balcony of his architect-designed flat at the fringes of the Barbican.

Very quickly, Sutton starts to drop hints that Matt is capable of losing control of himself and inflicting serious harm, and the true shape of Get Me Out of Here becomes clear – it’s not just a story of someone’s life spiralling out of control, it’s a guessing game about whether the manipulative and lying narrator is in fact a serial killer. It’s cleverly handled, and Sutton keeps us on our toes – at first it feels like a bluff, later on you’re not so sure, and in the end Matt’s life has become so fractured, the extent of his delusion clear for all to see, that the reader will start to doubt everything they think they know about him and his story.

Get Me Out of Here is well written and well paced, and Matt Freeman is a chillingly plausible (and profoundly dislikeable) creation. For a book billed as a black comedy, I can’t say that it raised many laughs, and while admiring the skill involved, I felt rather toyed with by the time the end appeared, an experience reminiscent of a another novel of a self-deluding killer: Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks. A book that’s as manipulative as its narrator, but impressive nonetheless for capturing the emptiness and lack of fulfillment at the heart of our capitalist society.

Bookmark to