At the start of The Witch Elm, Toby Hennessy introduces himself by saying, “I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person”. This is the first line of the novel, in fact, and proves to be the key to its dark heart.
The unfolding story deconstructs that statement. It confronts Toby with the fact that - despite feeling that his life changed beyond recognition after being beaten to oblivion in the early chapters - he has always been, basically, oblivious.
Luck? Is it really ‘luck’ that gave young, white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, handsome Toby Hennessy a leg-up in life? Just dumb luck? This is a novel about power and privilege.
The story is set in the elegantly dilapidated surroundings of the Ivy House, a mansion belonging to uncle Hugo, where Toby spent childhood summers with his cousins, Susanna and Leon. At times, The Witch Elm takes on the air of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, as the three cousins meander through the pages, drinking good wine, slagging less-fortunate ‘skangers’ and philosophising at length. No-one (except uncle Hugo) is especially sympathetic and some of these sections feel directionless.
But French has an important point to make, symbolised by the Ivy House. The cousins inhabit the same world - literally the same house - but different realities. A macabre discovery in a tree in the garden, the wych elm of the title, forces Toby to dig back into their shared and unshared past experiences. He discovers the true meaning of ‘luck’.
A departure from her Dublin Murder Squad series, Tana French once again offers a work of literary fiction that happens to feature a murder. The plot is slow moving and character led. It won’t please fans of a rapid page-turner, although sections of the novel - especially the build up to the ending - are gripping. Both frustrating and brilliant, its strength hits after the ending; rather like the giant wych elm, you only realise the magnitude and scale of the ideas after stepping away and regarding it from a distance.
Review: Maria in the Moon, Louise Beech
Catherine is a troubled young woman. Unhappily promiscuous, traumatised after losing her home to a flood, lonely and stuck in a dead-end job, she is compelled to volunteer on a late-night advice line where she bears witness to other people's anguish. She is also an extreme insomniac and troubled by her own memories - or lack of them. Something happened in her ninth year, but what? The novel is a slow reveal of past events and the theme of flooding provides a profound parallel for her experience. Repeatedly, if unwillingly, Catherine returns to her ruined home to witness its tortured process of repair.
"I closed my eyes. Remembered. Snow landed on my cheeks now as rain had that day. That day. we all called it That Day. That Day I'd opened the gate, causing a small wave. That Day I'd paused when brown, thigh high water wet my underwear. That Day waves had lapped at the windowsill, splashed tears against glass. It spilled into airbricks, entered though every hole and crack, uninvited, intrusive. It ruined all that I'd built, all that I had." *
Maria in the Moon is a rare treat - a novel that is stylistically sophisticated as well as intriguing enough to keep the pages turning. The characterisation is especially strong, with Catherine's caustic wit lightening the load. She's a wonderfully real and loveable character, full of contradictions - sad but funny, bleak but warm-hearted, smart but childlike. Her big reveal creeps into view with a sense of inevitability rather than surprise (for the character and the reader alike), but Louise Beech holds back a final twist for a satisfying denouement. Maria in the Moon is an impressive - and thoroughly enjoyable - modern suspense novel.
* Going back to look for this quote for the review, I'm again struck by the cleverness of this novel. I can't explain why without massive SPOILERS but this paragraph takes on deeper meaning at second reading. The fabulous sub-text reminds me of the Victorian literature I studied at uni - very clever indeed.
Review: The Tall Man, Phoebe Locke
The Tall Man takes daughters... so they say. But is he real or just an urban legend?
Back in 1990, a group of girls scare themselves silly by going into the woods looking for The Tall Man. Ten years later, one of those girls abandons a newborn baby to protect her from a curse. In a third timeline, that baby is all grown up - and a notorious killer - and we unearth her truth through the eyes of a television crew who are filming the teenager's every move.
At this stage of the review, I should confess that I don't read horror or anything supernatural because I'm a massive wimp. I have never read a Stephen King book (apart from On Writing) for the same reason - I can't because I'll never sleep again. So I started The Tall Man with some trepidation, but I needn't have worried... I didn't find it frightening. Not even spooky. It was atmospheric - especially the forest scenes - but lacked real menace.
The story is compelling, with a twist straight out of a 'true crime' show, but the tension got lost in the dense undergrowth of peripheral characters and tangled plot lines.
Review: SNAP by Belinda Bauer
On a broiling summer’s day in 1998, eleven-year-old Jack Bright and his two sisters sit in a broken-down car beside a busy road waiting for their mother who went to get help. No-one stops. No-one notices. No-one comes back.
Jump forward three years and a trio of police officers are hunting the “Goldilocks burglar” who breaks into homes and sleeps in the beds. Is he the same criminal who has left a knife and a threatening letter beside a pregnant woman’s bed?
And how does a burglar who mainly steals healthy food - "When the opportunity arose, he stole organic” - tie in with a cold case of a murdered woman from 1998?
Belinda Bauer’s razor-sharp wit and black humour always freshens my reading palate. Her plotlines and characters are decidedly quirky – even bizarre. In SNAP, a Dickensian vision of three children surviving on the fringes of modern society is touching, at times very funny, and distinctly weird. Minor characters such as "Smooth Louis Bridge", a criminal who obsessively removes his own hair, reveal the extent of her freaky imagination. But an eye for detail brings all this eccentricity back to real life.
Jack Bright’s eyes were narrow as a smoker’s and pale grey, as if all the colour had been cried out of them.
Detective Chief Inspector Marvel wasn’t one for knick-knacks but he did have an ashtray in the shape of lungs.
Belinda Bauer switches perspectives between characters without ever making it feel contrived. She somehow slides from one vivid and fleshed-out internal world to the next, puppet master-style. I love the smoothness and authority of her writing. And the profound characterisation, such as here, when the unveiled burglar reflects on his bad behaviour:
He always knew it wasn’t right, but his anger made it feel fair.
I’m a big fan of Belinda Bauer, as you might tell, although SNAP is an unusually light-hearted crime novel. I love gallows humour as much as the next swinger, but on reflection I didn’t feel much fear related to the actual killer who gets a bit lost in a crowd of cranks and crazies (the police as much as anyone else). It doesn’t matter to me, though – this book is dark, funny and heartfelt - and heroic Jack Bright and his sister's tortoise will live long in my mind.
Review: I Am Watching You, Teresa Driscoll
When Ella sees two local girls being chatted up by a pair of dodgy-looking men on the train to London, she considers intervening but decides to mind her own business. The next morning, one of the girls is missing.
Fast forward to a year later, and we meet all those touched by the tragedy - Ella, the witness whose life has been turned upside down after being publicly shamed for 'doing nothing', the friend with survivor's guilt, the grieving father with a secret of his own... and the mysterious voice of someone obsessed with watching. But who is he watching?
Via multiple points of view, short chapters and sentences, Teresa Driscoll maintains a breathless pace and a complex plot where every character has something to hide. In the genre of quick-read, can't-put-it-down, twisty-turny domestic thriller, this one delivers to perfection.
Review: Our Kind of Cruelty, Araminta Hall
From page one, it's clear that Mike is crazy about V, his sexually voracious girlfriend.
By the end of chapter one, it's clear that Mike is simply crazy and V is a young woman called Verity who is trapped in a toxic, obsessive relationship.
Both the strength and weakness of Our Kind of Cruelty was, for me, its structure as a domestic thriller; it has all the tension of the genre while simultaneously subverting the formula. However, the reader awaits twists and about-turns that never come - in this novel, what will be, will be. Nevertheless, the inevitability of events is compelling.
This is an intelligent novel and the author has an important point to make about controlling men and the treatment of women in the criminal justice system. The fact that the novel has been tagged as a "Gillian Flynn-style" thriller - Flynn being the reigning queen of the twist - adds to an aftertaste of unresolved expectations. Perhaps more insight into Verity's thinking would have added clarity, and a little more nuance would have lifted the ending.
Our Kind of Cruelty ploughs a pitiless path, and Hall's portrayal of a man with an unravelling mind is chilling. Her accomplished writing traps us inside Mike's disturbed mind - seeing up close the twisted logic that justifies his actions - resulting in an addictive and affecting read.
Published 3 May 2018
With thanks to #NetGalley for a review copy
Review: The Darkness, Ragnar Jonasson
A novel that unflinchingly lives up to its name.
There is lightness in the sympathetic main character of Hulda Hermannsdottir, a police detective in the final days of her long and distinguished career. Her world view feels fresh to crime fiction even while it is jaded to police work.
But all else is bleak - Hulda's unwelcome retirement, the Icelandic landscape, the loneliness of a bereaved mother, the struggle of a woman in a male-dominated job, the social isolation of an older single woman. Add to that a dead refugee and a police force that doesn't much care, and the tragic story unfolds right onto the final page, with its bold final twist.
This is the first in a series and I await the next instalment, hoping it leaves me as thoughtful as this story. The Darkness is a compelling read and Hulda is a magnetic personality, but, goodness, it's pitch black in her world.
My favourite line: "The advantage of the darkness is that there are no shadows."
With thanks to #NetGalley for a review copy
Review: The Essex Serpent
#AmReading
5* review
I find it tricky to review books I love as much as this one. Hard to know where to start, so I'll focus on a few elements that made this historical fiction sing to me.
The main character is Cora Seabourne, a wealthy widow who outlived a violently abusive husband and no longer Gives Any Fucks. A Victorian feminist in the tradition of Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennett, she is an awesome creation. Striding about the wilds of Essex in her hobnail boots and man’s coat (it is the condition of this coat rather than her behavior that raises eyebrows), she is driven on by a passion for paleontology. Rumours of a vicious beastie lurking in the Blackwater are too much for her to resist.
The novel is packed with incident and drama – like a classic Victorian novel, it is full of doomed love affairs, sudden and brutal changes of fortune, and a touch of the supernatural crashing hard into religious doctrine - but it is the characters that keep pages turning.
As well as Cora, there is a wide cast of friends and relations each of whom has a rich inner life. Sarah Perry avoids the usual depiction of Victorians as judgmental prudes, favouring a range of complex opinions and beliefs on politics and morality; much as we are now. With mentions of soldiers returning home from the war in Afghanistan and a London housing crisis, there is something pleasingly modern and relatable about this historical slice of Essex life.
Combined with the atmospheric descriptions of the landscape – a place of saltings and bladderwrack – it sparks Cora's world to vivid life.
“On turns the tilted world, and the starry hunter walks the Essex sky with his old dog at his heels.”
Review: The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
In his deservedly lauded novel, Colson Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a teenage girl who escapes from a brutal cotton plantation in Georgia where she has been enslaved all her life. Her friend, Caesar, leads Cora to the Underground Railroad.
Historically, the phrase described a network of abolitionists who aided escapees. In Colson Whitehead's fantasy, it becomes a literal railway with an unpredictable timetable and secret network of stations; a bizarre, steampunk, hellish vision of uncertainty: public transport for people with nowhere to go and no-one to trust.
Cora sets off on an Odyssey, never knowing if the mysterious railroad will deliver her somewhere better or worse than the last stop. She's told to look out of the train window to see the real America, but as her hope of finding sanctuary fades, she comes to realise a bleak truth: all she can ever see out of the window of an underground train, is more darkness.
Colson Whitehead's writing is lyrical but devoid of hyperbole. Instead he leaves you with snapshots of cruelty; I had to put the book aside for a short while after reading about a slave who was whipped for the duration of the plantation owners' dinner party, prompting his guests to amuse themselves by eating more slowly. The use of real historical 'Wanted' notices from slavers seeking run-aways makes the reader painfully aware that these snapshots could well be Polaroids from the past.
There's so much to say about this novel - theses will no doubt be written - so I have narrowed it down to three reasons why everyone should read this book.
1. The language... Colson Whitehead pulls off some kind of magic trick and I will have to re-read the novel to work out how he does it with such subtlety - the modern language is tinged with the antique. He never degenerates into broad stokes of sepia-tones or patois-laden dialect, but the historical filter is strong.
2. The genre... already an author renowned for criss-crossing genre boundaries, Colson Whitehead seamlessly incorporates his vast imagination into Cora's Odyssey. The railroad transports her to 'paradise' and hell, and each of these worlds is unique, fully-formed, and yet blends in.
3. The reality... the book has been described as magical realism or fantasy, but is steeped in realism. Cora hides in an attic in a clear allusion to Anne Frank and the holocaust. The plight of the slaves is compared to the genocide of Native Americans. Colson Whitehead makes no direct comment on modern racial politics in the US, but he doesn't need to: it's all there on the page, in black and white, for anyone with a heart to read.
Review: The Blackbird Season, Kate Moretti
The latest gripping read from Kate Moretti starts with an eerie spectacle: thousands of dead birds fall from the sky onto the sacred ground of a small town's baseball field. It's the first act of desecration in a story that navigates the grey areas of abuse of power and defilement of trust. The panic over the birds sparks a chain of events that unravels the bonds of the whole community. Told from several points of view, the story circles around Nate Winters, a beloved teacher and baseball coach who is accused of taking too close an interest in one of his students. The languid atmosphere that Kate Moretti conjures up in her crumbling town, wilting under its poverty and summer heat, belies the pace and verve of this nail-biting suspense.
Review: Afterlife, Marcus Sakey
A unique genre-bending thriller that offers as good an explanation for the atrocities of our times as any other popular belief system. When FBI agent Will Brody is killed by a bomb while hunting a serial killer, he wakes up in the afterlife: an eerie Echo of the Chicago streets he just departed, populated by ghosts of those who also suffered violent deaths. Brody's FBI boss -- and love-of-his-life -- Claire McCoy soon hunts down the suspect; but Brody knows the killer is not what he seems. Via an excellent plot twist, Brody and McCoy are reunited, and need all their combined crime-fighting skills to face a battle of epic proportions.
Sakey's imagination is both ambitious and savvy, tapping into contemporary concerns, such as seemingly meaningless tragedies and the control that all-powerful entities hold over us. Happily, his vision is also vast enough to conceive of a female character with real guts and heart, who shares a carefully-drawn relationship of genuine respect and affection with her male work/life partner. Extra stars awarded for that!
Review: The Outrun, Amy Liptrot
Reading The Outrun on the ro-ro ferry to the Northern isle of Westray
It’s always a delight to read novels in situ - enjoying a work of literature while immersed in the landscape of its setting adds value to both experiences.
My first stop on arriving in the Scottish island of Orkney was Skara Brae - a site of neolithic houses, beautifully preserved in the sand, which pre-date the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. While sheltering from the ubiquitous Orcadian wind in the gift shop, I chanced upon treasure and gave a squeak like an archaeologist uncovering an ancient hoard: a book set here in Orkney.
A neolithic home at Skara Brae beside the Bay of Skaill.
The Outrun describes Amy Liptrot’s journey from her island home—and the kind of childhood that involved galloping on horseback across the sands behind Skara Brae—to a ten-year period of alcoholism in London, then back home to Orkney and sobriety. Rather than the misery memoir you might expect, Liptrot engages in a psychoanalysis of Orkney itself. The Outrun is a detailed, beautiful and compelling paean to the place that made, broke and healed her.
The book is full of curiosities: such as the time a storm washed a seal clean over a fence. Or the fact that schools prevent the smallest children from playing outside in high winds for fear they will blow away. And the kindly neighbour who delivered a third of a cabbage to her isolated house because she’d complained that a whole vegetable for too large for a single person.
The North Sea from the Broch of Birsay, Orkney Mainland
Sometimes, it’s hard to know where Orkney ends and Amy begins. Time and again, she frames herself, her illness (and that of her father who is bipolar), in terms of the landscape; glorious and deeply meaningful metaphors about tides, migratory birds, geology. At the start, she says: ‘I was born into the continual, perceptible crashing of sea at the edges’. By the end of the book: ‘I’m realising that times of anxiety are necessary and unavoidable and, in any case, I like the edge: it’s where I get the best ideas. The edge is where I’m from.’
The Outrun started as a column and the later chapters occasionally fall into a episodic pattern that suggests a compilation of articles rather than a continuous narrative. But Liptrot’s elegant prose, acute observations and straightforward honesty carry this memoir about life lived in the wild.
Review: The Likeness, Tana French
In the second of her police procedural series set around the Dublin Murder Squad, Tana French focuses on Detective Cassie Maddox, a traumatised cop who bears an uncanny likeness to a murder victim.
A former undercover police officer, Cassie is recovering from the fallout of a prior case. When her new boyfriend, the solid and dependable detective Sam O’Neill, is called to a crime scene where a woman’s body has been found in a broken down cottage, he at first thinks it is Cassie. Instead, the victim is identified as Lexie Madison, a mature student who lives with a group of intellectual misfits at a grand house in the nearby village.
Although the privileged and aloof gang has a knack of making itself unpopular, there is no obvious motive for Lexie’s murder. With no leads or clues, the police hatch a plan to take advantage of the similarity between Cassie and Lexie to solve the crime. What ensues reveals that the two women may have had more in common than just outward appearance.
This slow-burning suspense invests time in building up characters, motives and tension. With the large cast of housemates and villagers, French expertly allows us to ponder their possible involvement in the killing. The mood of eccentricity, elitism and anachronism that pervades Whitethorn House slowly casts even battle-hardened Cassie under a spell; although the friends will also ring bells with anyone who enjoyed Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”.
The most engaging element is the collision between personal and professional in Cassie’s mind - we, like her, gradually conflate the officer and the victim until we don’t know where Lexie ends and Cassie begins. This is the heart of the novel: Cassie identifying and healing herself in the guise of the lost woman. So much so that the resolution of the central mystery — who killed Lexie Madison? — is almost an anticlimax that gets in the way of the more compelling curiosity about how Cassie will ever step out from the shadow of her ill-fated doppelgänger.
Review: The Good Widow
Jacqueline “Jacks” Morales is horrified to hear that her husband, James, has been killed in a car crash on the idyllic island of Maui, Hawaii. Adding insult to injury, he died alongside a young woman, Dylan, who appears to be his mistress. Reeling from a double-blow of grief and betrayal, Jacks agrees to accompany Dylan’s fiance, Nick, to Maui in search of answers. While Jacks anticipates an emotionally painful trip, she has no idea of the trauma and obsession that will escort them on their journey.
The location of Hawaii works especially hard in this gripping psychological thriller. First, it’s easy to share Jacks’ hurt—and sympathise deeply—when she learns that James took a ‘holiday of a lifetime’ with his bit-on-the-side. As soon as she arrives on Maui, the juxtaposition between the romance of the setting and the reality of her anguish is stark; and also ripe for conflict and the kind of confusion that keeps the chapters fresh.
The Good Widow is perfect for anyone who likes secrets and lies; and to keep guessing and second-guessing to the last page.
***
The Good Widow by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke is available on Amazon
Review: The Beautiful Dead, Belinda Bauer
Reading Belinda Bauer thrillers when you're alone in the house is never a good idea. Reading her books when you're alone and supposed to be writing your own novel is a terrible idea. With the story dipping and diving between the surface tension of the plot and the depths of the characters, it is hard to come up for air.
Eve Singer is a TV reporter on the 'meat beat' as a crime correspondent. Although a fairly typical hack in terms of ruthlessness and cunning, her squeamishness and aplomb in the face of casual sexism from rival hacks give her instant appeal. Most sympathetic of all, her home life is almost as tragic as the news she covers day-in, day-out. When a serial killer bursts onto the scene - literally, he sees himself as an artist - Eve thinks she has a chance to make the big time. Until she realises that she might become the next item on the evening news.
The baroque nature of the killer, who bears a passing resemblance to whatsisname from Silence of the Lambs, is alluded to in the butterfly-strewn cover art. But that is perhaps the only over-familiar aspect of this elevated crime novel - Bauer rings unusual notes that lift The Beautiful Dead out of the realms of the ordinary; lashings of black humour, a sweet little romance, a touching father-daughter plot line, and a wonderful kick-ass female detective whose diminutive size belies her mad skills.
Fans of crime fiction will love The Beautiful Dead. Fans of a nicely-turned phrase will too.
Review: The Dinner, Herman Koch
The novel plays out during an evening meal at a fancy restaurant, while two brothers and their wives attempt to resolve a family issue. It's a masterclass in the unreliable narrator and the slow reveal, as we are lead to conclude that the main character is a cranky misanthrope with a long-suffering wife, a failure with a humiliatingly-successful sibling, a sociopath with violent tendencies, and worse... and worse... until the true natures of the individuals gracing the dinner table are revealed. It's impossible to like anyone in this novel, but it's equally hard to stop thinking about them after it's finished. Brilliantly judged, whenever its exceptional darkness threatens to turn the stomach, a wicked dash of humour cleanses the palate.
Review: All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
Beautiful, lyrical, unusual suspense novel that perfectly walks the line between literary and thriller.
When we first meet Jake Whyte she is a lonely misfit, caring for sheep using her brutal strength amid the inhuman landscape of a Scottish island. Something is coming for the lambs in the night and we're not sure if it's a fox, a strange beast that locals claim inhabits the island, or something worse - something from Jake's past that may be connected to scars on her back. Then we move backwards in time, through Jake's sordid past in Australia, where every stage in her sad life is not quite what we expect.
Accomplished and moving novel, with an intriguing main character who upsets all our expectations of both women and literary tropes.
***
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Review: We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver
It's hard to write a review for a book that could easily support a thesis.
This novel is a rare example of both form and content being raised to the highest level, as well as a conclusion that is inevitable but shocking. It's extraordinary in its ability to trigger both revulsion and sympathy, and leave you feeling for the characters long after the pages have turned.
I gave this novel 5* on Goodreads, where you can follow my reviews or author page
Review: The Mothers, Brit Bennett
“All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unriped secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”
Affecting novel about the choices we make in our youth that stay with us for a life time. Nadia Turner is a young woman, grieving for her mother, while growing up in a tightly-knit, conservative town dominated by a church community. Its judgmental voice is brilliantly rendered by The Mothers – a collective group of elders who cannot respect the freedom and individuality Nadia seeks and the steps she takes to achieve her goal. But this novel is never simplistic; we also witness their wisdom and the warmth that Nadia seeks within their fold. Packed with deep themes and pertinent observations, the prose offers moments of great beauty.
Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal
In this brilliantly-observed novel, the main character reminds me very much of her home city of London; Nikki embodies its complex blend of cultures, its tradition and modernity, conformity and subversion, warmth and conflict.
When Nikki volunteers to run a writing class at a local gurdwara, she becomes our guide to Southall, where we meet a group of barely-literate women who quickly reveal a shared passion and talent for story-telling. Their tales are both erotic and risky, given the social tensions at play within their Sikh Punjabi community.
The novel is packed full of lifelike characters who are drawn with warm-hearted (and sometimes wicked) wit. By turns touching and saucy, with a suspense to raise the stakes, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is a layered and satisfying read.
But I may never feel the same way about ghee.
***
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