Behind Her Eyes

The reader’s impression of David goes through several transformations as Louise and Adele’s attitudes toward him change during the events of the story. He is not given his own chapters in first-person voice, so his emotions and behavior are reported second-hand through the narration of the other characters.

David is a handsome, educated, charming and, seemingly straightforward young man. Raised on a farm with a vocation to help people, he studies psychiatry and is a loving and caring partner to Adele. Both Adele and Louise see him as a hero in the respective beginnings of their relationships with him. He appears to Louise at first to have no ulterior motive nor to be deliberately adulterous, when they meet and kiss in the bar: “The guilt in his eyes. The apology” (12). However, Adele’s earlier description of him refers to rage and the “quiet loathing in his eyes” (8). Pinborough thus plants seeds of doubt in the reader’s mind as to David’s nature, which becomes one of the main concerns for Louise as she seeks to unravel his and Adele’s past. Louise also wavers in her belief in his love for her as he seems to turn against her in fear and anger over her involvement with his wife. David’s love is vital to Adele too, and losing it is the reason behind her destructive behavior. Rob’s obsession with David, since the moment he first saw him, has actually been the driving force behind the whole complicated story.

Like each of the other main characters, David has a substance abuse problem and hides his alcohol supplies in his office drawer along with his file on Adele. His own father was an alcoholic, but this is not the only reason for his addiction. He needs to escape from reality and the secret he and Adele share, which she uses to blackmail him into staying with her. He also has scars on his arms from the fire from which he saved Adele. Her parents died in that fire, and the motivation for his intervention is a question asked by Rob, Louise, and the police investigators of the time. David claims his innocence to Louise, but Adele has created an overriding suspicion in Louise and in the readers’ minds that cannot be erased through his pleas. David is finally exonerated by Adele’s letter and returns to hero status when he marries Louise and takes on a parental role for Adam, although he is innocent of who he is actually marrying and their plans for him.

Adele is the complex central character of the book and the title, Behind Her Eyes, refers to her. She is beautiful, charming, rich, and attracts every other main character and secondary characters (including Anthony Watkins and Dr. Sykes). She is the daughter of rich parents who died in a suspicious fire and has inherited their home and wealth. She has, however, a very dark and mysterious past and a manipulative and destructive nature which combine to cause the events in the story—or so the reader is led to believe.

Adele is given her own chapters where she narrates in first person which is how the reader learns of her unstable personality, nefarious intentions, and consistent deceit. The reader cannot trust her narration, but when she speaks, the reader is witness to the true nature of her mind. There are echoes of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth in her internal discourse from the beginning, as when she says, “[t]here’s still mud under my fingernails […] We need to repair this (7),” in reference to a destructive act she recently committed and to an earlier crime. Her will and resilience are expressed in another reference to the words of Lady Macbeth: “I must screw my courage to the sticking place and I will not fail” (354). Her determination and fierce love of David are also evident from Chapter 3: “I love my husband. I have since the moment I set eyes on him, and I will never fall out of love with him. I won’t give that up. I can’t” (9). Despite such statements, Adele pushes David into Louise’s arms, causing intrigue and the psychological mystery of the story.

Adele’s past and to some extent the reasons for her emotional instability and psychological problems are revealed through the chapters entitled “Then,” which contain her perspective but in third person. She refers early on to her childhood: “A home needs to be filled with love, and some houses—her own, as it had been, included—don’t have enough heat in their love to warm them” (33). She was a “half-forgotten child” (34); that lack of love seems to be the driving force behind her obsessive attachment to David, her need to be loved by Rob, and desire for admiration by all who meet her. She doesn’t allow herself to smile and believes that “[s]he doesn’t deserve to be happy. Where has all her happiness led?” (35). She is clever, and feels superior to the therapists in Westlands, who she manages to manipulate like everyone else in her life. She switches her charm on and off; she gives the impression of being meek and sweet to Louise and is crazy and capable of great violence to David. She is a master of cunning and manipulation: “Watching, waiting, learning, practising [sic]” (261). She uses people for her own ends, admitting to herself about Louise: “She’s my little wind-up doll, walking in whichever direction I point her” (263). Her ability to bend people’s behavior to suit her will is the consistent thread throughout the book and reaches its pinnacle when she deliberately causes the fire allowing her to switch bodies with Louise and therefore regain David’s love.

Despite Adele’s success at manipulation and control, she is revealed in David’s psychiatry file to have had breakdowns, and that he suspects “paranoia and extreme jealousy” (243). He refers to her “[p]sychotic break. Sociopathic tendencies” (244). While her characterization is convincing and coherent and the reader is pulled in by her charm along with those around her, it seems she may not be completely sane. Given her deceptive and intelligent nature, however, no one can never really be sure if she is faking insanity.