Molly Cutpurse

Livina is a female orphan infant raised by the state and trained, military style, to become a professional executioner working for one of the UK’s top secure prisons. Hers is a story of retribution and redemption set in an intelligent, capitalist society obsessively consumed with voting and finance.

Executrix is like Seven Sisters, another bildungsroman. A satirical and critical drama set in a not so distant dystopian future. Through a dark obsession, motherly pain and courage, she alters the course of her own evolution.

Horror story? Love story? You decide.

'The most disturbing book I've read since Clockwork Orange'

Malcolm Hill

Executrix
Molly Cutpurse
ISBN 978-1-4457-0689-4
Review by Marie Marshall - writer and poet. http://mairibheag.webs.com/

Imagine a Britain a decade or so into the future, which has become so reactionary in its attitude to crime that not only has corporal and capital punishment been reintroduced, but it has become a public spectacle via mass media. This is the Britain of Livina, the country’s most admired dispenser of punishment. This is the Britain of “Executrix”.

Molly Cutpurse, the author, presents this novel thus: “Horror story? Love story? You decide”. In fact it is a dark story which hints at humour but keeps it tantalizingly out of reach. There are descriptions which will make you squirm (if you are of the generation which regularly slaughters foes by the thousand in computer games and chugs lager whilst guffawing at Saddam Hussain’s execution on YouTube don’t bother – it’ll go right over your head), and the writer doesn’t flinch from the horror. They are delivered in Livina’s dispassionate voice. Likewise the descriptions which play with your emotions are delivered with a kind of flatness. It is as though something has been seared in Livina’s character. The love story within this book is given comparatively little space, and it is not so much her lover which engages what is left of her compassion, but the issue of their love.

Livina’s narrative is intense, relentless, and self-absorbed. She seems to me to have a borderline Aspergers condition, an obsessive-compulsive character. I love the way she makes her story into episodes, deciding how and when to give us details. This is so much more than a story, it is an apologia, an inner narrative, and this shows a mature imagination at work in the creation of the novel the like of which I haven’t seen since “A Clockwork Orange”. Maybe, as the author claims, the “love” of the “love story” is her own life, and not the brief liaison.

The book is full of “Easter Eggs”, little references to other authors and so on. For instance, two children with the names Harry and Hermione are briefly mentioned. Such things sewn or sown into a work which is already so intense are like salt on a poke of chips, and give the book its humorous edge.