Run Time
By Catherine Ryan Howard
Corvus, UK
ISBN: 978-1838951672
448pp.

Irish crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard’s sixth and latest novel, Run Time, is a psychological thriller set on a remote location in Ireland where a horror film called Final Draft is about to be shot.

Adele Rafferty is a former soap opera actor, now fallen on hard times. She agrees to star in the off-beat production in the hopes that it might resuscitate her career, which has all but fizzled out since her time as a child star. She boards a plane from Los Angeles to Dublin and finds herself on set within a day, ready to replace an actor who has had to leave in an emergency.

Exhausted, jetlagged and needing to adjust to a gruelling schedule that demands long night-time shoots, Adele knows this is torture. But she needs the money. And she loves acting.

However, things start to get deeply unsettling fairly quickly once Adele realises that events in her life are beginning to display an uncanny resemblance to those described in the film’s script.

Run Time is written as a first-person account, interspersed with extracts from the script for the film Final Draft. The overall narrative is structured sort of like Russian Matryoshka dolls, as the script for the film features a couple taking a vacation at a cottage where a writer of horror fiction has left a number of copies of his self-published novel, First Draft.

An enjoyable thriller that’s very much a publication of this era. But it is no great work of literary fiction that will live on as emblematic of the times

This turducken — First Draft inside Final Draft inside Run Time — features a series of events that are mirrored in the lives of the couple in the film script. In turn, these are then reflected in actress Adele’s life, causing her to question what’s going on.

Could this be a series of coincidences, or the result of the antics of an all-male film crew bullying the only woman around? Could it be Adele’s own history of mental illness catching up with her, or is there something far more sinister afoot?

“Suddenly the terrifying thing was not what had happened here, but the possibility that nothing much had happened at all. That I had invented this. Created an elaborate drama that revolved entirely around me, and then refused to accept anything that didn’t reinforce it. A self-confirming delusion.

“That possibility was the most horrific one of all.”

Ordinarily, our first impulse whenever we experience harassment of any sort is to question whether what we think is happening is, in fact, actually happening. Usually, there is a generous tendency to ascribe to chance and accident what could otherwise be attributed to malice. In a post MeToo world, however, people are wary even of microaggressions and the minutest linguistic faux pas can be construed as indicative of latent sexism or bigotry.

At the same time, as more people begin to espouse the notion of a liberal-feminist sisterhood, the lines in the sand are drawn perhaps too sharply. One is, therefore, likely to be led into a false sense of security, assuming all women are safe, nurturing comrades, while all men are a potential threat, if not downright evil.

As a genre, the thriller exploits precisely this sort of complacency and binary thinking in general, by reframing, say, the family, pets, children or any social structure we rely on, in a way that makes us question our willingness to trust. Run Time reminds us again that the human individual is unpredictable and, in this instance — as in real life — far more than just a gender stereotype. And yet, one must trust! The only alternative would be a bleak cynicism that treats all people as equally untrustworthy!

Run Time reminds us that the human individual is unpredictable and far more than just a stereotype. On another level, the novel also highlights how people can be coerced into doing things they would usually consider immoral or unjust. All you have to do is offer them the promise of a bright future and they will, momentarily, turn a blind eye.

Our motivations can be complex or, at times, far too basic to be adequately reduced to a function of our genders. At the risk of replacing one form of reductive thinking with another, a better predictor of human behaviour is the logic of capital. A conversation between the protagonist and a film director suggests that individuals in the film industry are more likely to hate the player, as it were, rather than hating the game. But the reader can discern that the characters aren’t quite aware of this themselves:

“They blame us for being more successful than them, but not everyone gets what they want. Not everyone can. That’s not how the world works. Some of us are just more talented than others.”

“But some of us get a lot more luck than our talent deserves.”

How an actor becomes a commodity is, for Adele, an instance of “luck”, but what the actor does not comprehend is how easily the value of that commodity, artificially inflated by public relations’ organisations, can be deflated — as evidenced by her own backstory. The actor remains an unwitting, tragically egotistical pawn in the hands of large productions.

On another level, the novel also highlights how people can be coerced into doing things they would usually consider immoral or unjust. All you have to do is offer them the promise of a bright future and they will, momentarily, turn a blind eye.

While the story of Run Time is adequate as far as thrillers go, it does seem that the novel suffers a little because of the author’s choice to write it in the first-person. This eliminates at least one aspect of the mystery: will the protagonist survive? However, there are several other facets to the mystery that are not affected by this choice and keep the reader sufficiently absorbed.

References to the pandemic, the lockdown, to meme culture as evidence of a film’s — in this case, Jurassic Park — historic value, to the role that social media plays in making and breaking the lives of those who are in the public eye, along with references to the MeToo movement, all make Howard’s novel very much a publication of this era.

But it is no great work of literary fiction that will live on as emblematic of the times. It is a book to be read and enjoyed by fans of thrillers, and then put aside. This novel, just like the stuff one encounters on social media, exists solely for entertainment in the moment. It would be a mistake on the part of the potential reader to approach it with any other expectations.

The reviewer is a bibliophile

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 18th, 2022