Sometimes it takes a book to truly comprehend the scale of an atrocity. Documentaries can be gasped at, reportage consumed in a lunch break. Alison Kervin’s The Monster of Harrods requires you to sit with the grotesque serial sexual assaults perpetuated by the late Mohamed Al-Fayed, former owner of Harrods department store.
The label of monster is inherently othering. Fayed — Kervin refuses him the honour of his self-appointed Al — behaved monstrously, but he was just a man – albeit one with money and enormous power. Still, to read this accounting of his perverted desires to hurt and humiliate is to enter a world of baroque horrors. Kervin paints a terrifying portrait of the lair he built within Harrods, parasitically nesting in a British institution and warping it into a veritable Bluebeard’s castle rigged with cameras and microphones to spy on the women he preyed upon with impunity.
