This was a fun read, and there were lots of surprises along the way. Since I had seen the movie first, it took me a long time to realize that the narrator was anonymous, and it also didn't become clear until later that the novel was set in England. Neither is very important.

The story is told in first person, as diary entries by the main character. He lives with an ailing, overbearing mother in an enormous old house that neither can afford. When he decides to save a family of rats from drowning, he befriends them and becomes their caretaker, slowly training a group in simple tricks. At first, he does it as a pastime, later he uses the rats in revenge against his boss, and even later he uses them to rob stores and unsuspecting wealthy families.

It's a very strange book, and I couldn't get over the numerous weird left turns it took throughout the course of the novel. As unbalanced and unreliable as the narrator is, you still sympathize with him, and his rationalizations somehow made sense to me a lot of the time. I also really liked how his logic began to fail and his actions became increasingly more deplorable as the story continues. And even while that happens, he starts to realize how crazy he really is and begins to clean himself up and lead a more normal life.

The parts where the narrator is sneaking around to commit his crimes can be genuinely suspenseful, but things can slow down quite a bit with the copious descriptions of much of the narrator's rather mundane life. Many people might find this too slow, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. ( )