Squeeze by Chris Rhatigan follows the life of Lionel Kaspar, an amateur reporter who wants to make the headlines without doing any of the work. He fabricates his news stories, blackmails people, gambles away his earnings and continually drinks on the job. However, everything comes to a head when a journalist at a competing newspaper, Greg Hulas, begins to investigate Kaspar’s fabricated stories, meaning the possible jeopardy for Kaspar’s career as a news reporter.
Rhatigan’s novel is quick, fast-paced and interesting. What I liked best about it was probably the overall plot to the book; following Kaspar from slacking off as a novice news journalist to having to work twice as hard as any other journalist, simply to try and fix his previous mistakes. All the while readers can find themselves following Kaspar’s investigations (sometimes successful, sometimes utter failures) for leads on stories. The plot keeps you interested throughout.
The writing, too, aids along with this. Rhatigan’s prose, and Kaspar’s voice alongside it, is witty and sharp throughout. His conversations, interactions with others, manage to be amusing but not over the top. Kaspar’s voice, therefore, pervades the prose of the novel, creating authenticity in Rhatigan’s first-person narrative. However, at times, Kaspar’s distinctive voice had the tendency to seep into the voices of other characters. Kaspar’s sharp wittiness that readers witness in both the prose and dialogue of the novel, can often be seen directed back at him by other characters in the novel.
This leads me to the major issue I had with this book: the characters. Or specifically the character of Kaspar himself. While he was an enjoyable protagonist to read about, in that he gets up to all sorts of shenanigans and wrongdoings, making for an interesting read, he didn’t make for a sympathetic character. Instead, it was all too easy to root against Kaspar throughout the whole book, especially when the motivations for all his actions seemed to be driven by greed and money. Not to mention that there was no grounding for Kaspar’s character; we learn nothing of his friends or family, or his past outside of the fabricated one he pitches to his boss at one point.
He’s a selfish, solitary character whose only motivation is self-preservation and greed. Nor does he show any sort of growth throughout the novel, despite the trouble that his greed ultimately lands him in. Kaspar remains a self-serving character throughout, seeking to exploit and utilise the people around him in order to gain what he wants. While this is an interesting character trait, it’s one that created distance between myself, as the reader, and the book as a whole.
Despite this, I found Rhatigan’s novel to be quite enjoyable, managing to finish the entire thing in one sitting. I may not have sympathised with his protagonist, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy reading about his protagonist’s constant string of unethical and questionable actions as a journalist.
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