Rebecca

Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca has been on my reading list probably for years but I realised, as I started to read it, that although the novel is incredibly eminent, I did not really know anything about it. It took a few chapters to hook me in but after that it just seemed to get better and better; Daphne du Maurier sustains suspense so well! It is difficult, then, to write a review that doesn’t give away the big reveals but, it is safe to say, Rebecca will not disappoint.

Narrated by the new Mrs. de Winter of Manderley, who lives in the shadow of Maxim de Winter’s first wife, Rebecca, the novel is full of mystery. Our narrator is constantly aware of her inability to live up to the first Mrs. de Winter and is intrigued by the way everyone talks about her.

Although part of the gothic genre, the story feels very real. I particularly love it when characters in books reflect what would happen if they were in a book, so this moment stood out to me: “In a book or a play I would have found a revolver, and we should have shot Flavell, hidden his body in a cupboard. There was no revolver. There was no cupboard. We were ordinary people. These things did not happen.” I believe this makes the narrator all the more relatable and, though we never learn her first name, our sympathies always lie with Mrs. de Winter. Her efforts to please and live up to her name at times seem a little desperate, but the reader is invited into her world and her struggle to be a part of a place which seems so alien to her. And when events take a turn for the worse and her moral outlook becomes questionable, we are still fully on her side.

It is a novel known for its sense of place and this is evoked vividly throughout. The isolated mansion in the wilds of Cornwall, with its closed rooms, a sinister servant and view of the sea is the perfect place to contain secrets. Du Maurier also uses pathetic fallacy to heighten the changes in mood, particularly through the fog that comes and goes. Despite this, the narrator has an idyllic view of Manderley, its grandeur clouding her judgement. Her observation that “the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed […] No one would ever hurt Manderley. It would lie always in a hollow like an enchanted thing, guarded by the woods, safe, secure” is ironic given the opening chapter (which begins at the end) and the final twist, but we know from the famous first line, “last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”, that it is not a place to be forgotten and nor is the book.

The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt

Another dark and compelling read by Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch is a novel about a boy named Theo who is caught in a bombing in an art museum in New York. He survives and, on impulse, takes out from the rubble with him an old, rare and expensive painting, The Goldfinch.

This painting drives the novel, despite being taped up in a pillow case for much of the action. It connects Theo to his mother and to the people he met on that fateful day. It becomes a source of wonder but also a source of guilt and trouble that haunts him and leads him to another near-death experience in Amsterdam, from which he narrates the novel’s opening. From this point, Tartt takes us back to follow Theo’s life from the day at the museum. In having Theo narrate in hindsight, we learn some key plot points quite early on but this does not stop The Goldfinch from being a strangely compulsive read.

At 864 pages, it is also a mammoth read. I found some parts of the book, for example, sections of the time when Theo was living with his father in Vegas, a little tedious, but this probably made it all the more realistic and a reflection of the narrator’s experience. Not every day in a person’s life is full of danger and mystery and when Theo faces unexpected twists they seem to shock him most of all. Towards the end of the book, he articulates the latest turn as, “Everywhere: strangeness. Without noticing it I’d left reality and crossed the border into some no-man’s-land where nothing made sense.” The reader enters this state with him and it is as if we are there watching open-mouthed.  

In The Goldfinch, Tartt not only tells a great story, but also a complex one, where characters and life events, all intricately drawn, cause the reader to reflect on love and friendship, kindness and selfishness, guilt and innocence. The novel’s narrator, Theo, is of flaws yet holds the reader’s sympathy throughout. Theo’s friend Boris, a crazy, criminal and complicated character, is also something of a philosopher, fearlessly facing the world in his own way.

“I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other […] What if our badness and our mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good?” Or, as Theo echoes later, “can’t good come around sometimes through some strange backdoors?”

Perhaps the novel ends in this way, with good coming out of ‘strange back doors’; yet, Theo still lives with guilt, confusion and the need to put right mistakes he has made along the way. The ending is not wholly satisfying, leaving the reader with many unanswered questions, but maybe that’s because it is more of a beginning.

Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing is a moving and striking first novel by retired wildlife scientist, Delia Owens. A romance as well as a murder-mystery, this descriptive tale is one that I found difficult to put down.

Set in the marshes of North Carolina, there is an overwhelming sense of place. Kya, the central character, seems a part of the marsh, her natural habitat. We see the beauty and power of nature which is Kya’s only point of reference. Humans are compared to the wildlife and the wildlife is compared to humans. Owens writes about “the ballet of fireflies” and the heron like a “predacious bridesmaid”. She has said that there is a symbolism in the marshes: people must navigate between the bright open waterways and the darker, murkier swap – like the two sides of human nature. There is pathetic fallacy in the weather and the seasons of her life reflect the changing elements, “low clouds parting, the sun splashing her world briefly, then closing up dark and tight-fisted again”.

She has had a traumatic childhood, “a life defined by rejections”. Abandoned by family members, even her mother, she searches for a reason: “within all the worlds of biology, she searched for an explanation of why a mother would leave her offspring”. Owens does not reveal this explanation until later on.

The Townspeople scorn and condescend Kya because she does not live like them. Kya may not know how to read until she is a teenager, or how to count to thirty, but she possesses an unconventional wisdom: “She knew more about tides and snow geese, eagles and stars than most ever would [and] she was awfully good at reading eyes”. Kya is a character who is constantly underestimated by everyone, even the reader. Where the Crawdads Sing is a novel full of surprises, yet there is a sense of inevitability throughout.

The story unfolds to gradually reveal details about Kya and her childhood as the narrative switches in between her life in the marshes and the story of Chase Andrews’s death, until the two converge and Kya is implicated in murder. I found the story gripping and it faintly reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird in the court case and the insular American South community, prejudiced against anyone who is different. However, the plot seemed a little contrived at points and I did find the ending somewhat unsatisfactory.

Kya falls in love, aged 15, with Tate, a boy from the town, who teaches her to read. This opens up her world to new possibilities and experiences. Words have a powerful presence in this novel as Kya herself articulates when learning to read: “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full”. Tate smiles, “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much”. Owens’s words certainly hold a lot.

Definitely evocative, and perhaps as vivid as the descriptions of the marsh, is the detail given to what appears to be the main theme of the novel: loneliness and isolation. Kya, who has grown up on her own, “tortured by millions of minutes alone”, feels this so acutely that it becomes an almost tangible presence. When waiting for Tate to come back from college, “The lonely became larger than she could hold”. Loneliness is “a natural appendage to Kya, like an arm”, it grows “roots inside her and press[es] against her chest”. It is a part of her that will never go away. She tells her brother, “Please don’t talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation”. Owens presents Kya as isolation personified, a character who fits into the natural world better than she fits into society. She has learned to look after herself and do what is necessary to survive. She is a character who looks to nature for solace and understanding, “if anyone understood loneliness, the moon would”, and when away from home, it is the seagulls she misses the most.

The title is fitting for a book about isolation. Early in the novel, Kya is told by Jumpin’ and Mabel (an older couple who look out for her) that the social services are after her so is aware of the need to meet with Tate somewhere people can’t find them. Tate suggests, “we better hide way out there where the crawdads sing”. When she asks him what it means, he says it’s: “far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters”. It is in this wild and beautiful place where Kya, and therefore the novel dwells.

The Secret History

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw’, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does.” This is how The Secret History opens. The narrator creates suspense for the story he is about to tell, “How to begin”, he contemplates. It is, however, incredibly well-crafted, using other elements of the classics in a story about the downfall of a group of classics students at a college in Vermont. We begin with what seems to be a prologue, and one that reveals the downfall: one of their fellow students (Bunny) is murdered. Knowing this makes the novel even more compelling – we know what happens, but must know why and how. Tartt is even cleverer than this first appears, however, since the murder is by no means the end of the story. And it is what comes after this that is most haunting – an exploration of human guilt and the way in which no one ever gets away with a crime. Bunny’s laughter “still haunts me”, the narrator later reveals.

The plot is essentially this: Classics students, obsessed with their subject, carry out an ancient ritual which leads to the accidental murder of an innocent man. The drive to cover this up, leads to the murder of their classmate.

Tartt’s skill as a writer is especially demonstrated in the way that the whole thing feels entirely believable and almost normal. Although most of the characters are unlikeable and their actions inexcusable, the reader is made to understand why they behave as they do. “A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world”.

The death of Bunny itself is a shock but I do not believe that the reader is meant to feel much sympathy for Bunny, an obnoxious character, or for his family, who only seem to be superficially sad that he is gone.

There are many ‘secret histories’ in the novel and things left unspoken, even by the end. We see everything through our narrator, Richard’s eyes, “I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story”, and the relationships between other characters often seem shadowy. Even Henry, the brains behind the whole operation is shrouded in mystery, his suicide never fully explained or discussed. He doesn’t even seem to feel guilt, presented almost as amoral. Tells Richard that the murder gave him a “surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility”.

Unreliable narrators are common in literature, and Richard has been compared with Nick in The Great Gatsby. He is simultaneously appalled and enthralled by the people around him, drawn into their mess and responsibilities. He so desires to be liked and approved by them that he becomes involved in murder. He only seems to have one moment of doubt: “who were these people? How well did I know them? Could I trust any of them, really, when it came down to it?”

The narrator constantly analyses their actions – how and why they did what they did, “it wasn’t until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act of murder can actually be”. This analysis is offset by the dramatic tension of the events of the novel itself and intensified through the use of pathetic fallacy, for example, when they plot how to kill Bunny “everything was still. Outside, the crickets shrieked with rhythmic, piercing monotony”. And once the deed is done, an unusual snowfall happens despite the fact that it is spring: “A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape”.

It seems that the silence is the scariest of all, “I thought of Bunny’s dark room and of the ravine, miles away; of all those layers of silence on silence”. Richard goes to parties, takes drugs, they all drink and drink to fill the void, to banish the darkness, “unmedicated sleep was impossible.”

Definitely worth a read, I found The Secret History thoroughly gripping, but more than that, powerfully haunting beyond the final pages.

How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time – Matt Haig

What a great title for a book! I am always drawn to things about time and this novel has a particularly interesting an unusual premise – a central character who ages much more slowly than everyone else. This allows Haig to make observations about time, both in general to all humankind, and specific to his protagonist’s unique way of experiencing the world.

We join Tom’s long life in the present as he moves back to London and becomes a history teacher. He is over 400 years old but only looks around 40. Fittingly, in his interview, the headteacher, Daphne says, “’time, […] is a strange thing, isn’t it?’” She has no idea. The novel includes flashbacks from his childhood and various other points in his life, as he works for William Shakespeare, survives the plague, meets F Scott Fitzgerald and sails with Captain Cook.

He is managed by the Albatross Society (its members, Albas), which is governed by Hendrich, who says he is there to protect them, but makes the members do illegal and immoral acts under the pretense of keeping the secret in order to protect them from scientific testing. He teaches Tom the central rule: “you can love the sight of waterfalls and the smell of old books, but the love of people is off limits”. Essentially, not to get attached to people because it will cause you to lose your mind.

This, however, seems impossible. The character who has touched Tom’s life the most is his first love, Rose, in the 17^th century. Time’s cruelty takes her though, and hundreds of years later he still misses her.  “And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries”. The book follows him struggling to come to terms with the loss of Rose and other people he has known and loved: “It had made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.” His daughter, Marion, an Alba too, or so he hopes, is also missing and he has been unable to track her down.

At times the novel is full of melancholic musings. Tom’s condition seems to be more a curse than a blessing. At one point he observes, “it occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean.”  He seems to despair at human beings “making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again”, and that despite the lessons of history, “everything changes and nothing changes”, and “if you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.” Tom has clear frustrations with the way society has changed for the better and also for the worse and the endless cycle from which he cannot escape. And, no matter how long you live, you can’t escape the human mind! Tom tells one of his students after he catches him with a dodgy crowd late at night, “you realise that you never get away with things. The human mind has its own…prisons.”

Yet, How to Stop Time also contains a great deal of humour and light-hearted observations. For example, as an aside whilst Tom is sat in a doctor’s waiting room, he observes, “one thing that has remained constant, across four centuries, has been the desire for a British person to fill a silence with talk of the weather”.

The novel ends with hope for Tom, reunited with his daughter and pursuing a new relationship with a fellow teacher. Despite his vast knowledge of the past, he is the same position as everyone else when it comes to the future: “That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.” Not quite stopping time, but the closest it seems a human being can get, along with the suspension of reality brought by the act of reading itself.

The Woman in White

The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White is considered to be one of the first ‘sensation’ novels. It a mystery told through the perspectives of multiple narrators. Originally serialised in Dickens’ magazine, it was very popular in its time.

The novel is deeply concerned with truth and accuracy. The different narrators are presented to tell their accounts in order to verify the story and tell their side to events. A plan, we are told by Mr Gilmore’s narrative (a lawyer), that is put in place by Mr Hartright (the central narrator) in order to “[present] the story to others, in the most truthful and most vivid manner, requires that it should be told, at each successive stage in the march of events, by the persons who were directly concerned in those events at the time of their occurrence”. The housekeeper also declares that she has been asked to give her testimony: “The reason given for making this demand on me is, that my testimony is wanted in the interests of the truth”.

We also hear much from Miss Halcombe, another central character, through her diary. We learn a great deal about the goings on in the house and Miss Halcombe’s quest to discover more about Sir Percival, the mystery that for a long time goes unresolved. We also see comments upon her personal narrative, for example: “The passages omitted, here and elsewhere, in Miss Halcombe’s Diary are only those which bear no reference to Miss Fairlie or to any of the persons with whom she is associated in these pages”. And, when she falls ill a note appears: “At this place the entry in the Diary ceases to be legible. The two or three lines which follow contain fragments of words only, mingled with blots and scratches of the pen.” These phrases add a sense of reality to the story.

Attention is also drawn, however, to the reliability, or unreliability, of memory. Miss Halcombe comments that, “In the perilous uncertainty of our present situation, it is hard to say what future interests may not depend upon the reliability of my recollection at the time when I make them”.

It is also important to note that there are significant characters in the novel who we do not hear from. Laura Fairlie, who appears weak is never given a voice, nor is ‘the woman in white’, Count Fosco’s wife, or Sir Percival, the main villain of the novel. The absence of their opinions and perceptions means that the account remains biased.

The Count, who appears almost evil in the central narratives, when it comes to his own voice, underplays his part in events and proclaims his innocence. “Why this outburst? Why this withering eloquence? Because my conduct has been misrepresented, because my motives have been misunderstood”. He calls on the reader to empathise with him, to see things from his point of view: “Youths! I invoke your sympathy. Maidens! I claim your tears” and tries to explain away his misdeeds. “Is my conduct worthy of any serious blame? Most emphatically, No! Have I not carefully avoided exposing myself to the odium of committing unnecessary crime?”

The rhetoric of his narrative is powerful and amusing. It makes Count Fosco seem more ridiculous than dangerous. However, his narrative is more sinister when he intrudes on Miss Halcombe’s diary. An entry shows that he has found and read it whilst she is ill, an invasion of privacy and a threat that he is powerful and knowing.

Mr Hartright’s narrative is also amusing and melodramatic on occasion. He writes, in summary of his time away, that “It was my third escape from peril of death. Death by disease, death by the Indians, death by drowning – all three had approached me; all three had passed me by”.

I felt that this novel was unnecessarily long, but this makes sense when it wasn’t originally meant to be read as one book but in excerpts. Moments of The Woman in White are striking and even a little scary all these years later! The image of the ghostly figure appearing on the road to London in the night definitely stays with you: “There, in the middle of the broad bright highroad – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bend it grave enquiry on mine”.

The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train broke records, spending weeks and weeks at number one on the bestseller list. It is easy to see why it became popular, a thriller, beginning with an ordinary commuter staring out the train window, and its title putting it in line with Gone Girl.

It starts off well, a seemingly innocent observation of the goings on in the gardens of the houses along the train line, “twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home”. But these are not just strangers, they are people just a few doors down from where she used to live; and she does not just innocently observe them but watch them religiously so they become almost idols and gets involved in a murder investigation when something goes wrong.

I certainly felt gripped, compelled to find out what happened next, however, I did not think it was as polished as Gone Girl, or as clever. In a similar way, though, the characters become increasingly unlikeable, which did reduce my interest. The main character, Rachel, is constantly drinking too much, gets involved where she shouldn’t, is a hopeless flatmate and leaves pathetic messages on her ex-husband’s phone. The other women who are given sections, Anna, the new wife, and Megan, the neighbour who is murdered, are both manipulative and adulterous. All three of them seem unreliable as narrators, especially given that Rachel is prone to blackouts and cannot remember what happened to her the night the murder took place.

I felt also that the way in which most of the characters seemed to live double lives was not very plausible. The plot is contrived around the blackouts so that Rachel’s past is crucial in revealing the true nature of the murderer, whose identity was a twist that I didn’t see coming for a long time.

I did like the way the novel was structured around different voices, each revealing something about their own lives that could not be recognised by others – things are never as they seem. What remains constant throughout is the train, moving back and forth between London. Though it ‘rarely’ takes the length of time it should, it is regular. The mornings and evenings are structured around the journey and Rachel continues in this pattern long after she has lost her job: “It’s 8:07 and I’m on the train. Back to the imaginary office”. And the final words return to the train, as it sets things in motion, a sign of return to normality: “I have to get up early tomorrow morning, to catch the train”.

All in all, I have to say it wasn’t as good as I expected given the hype but still worth a read. It definitely made me think about train journeys differently, at least for a little while.

Gone Girl

Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn

I generally don’t tend to read thrillers, so this was an interesting change, though Flynn’s novel is not a typical thriller. Be warned – this review gives away plot twists!

Gone Girl is the story of Nick and Amy and their marriage. It is also a novel about disappearing, murder, the media, money, betrayal and revenge. The book opens on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, present day, when Amy mysteriously disappears and their house becomes a crime scene. The fragility of their relationship is questioned and Nick soon becomes a suspect. He, the police, his twin sister, the townspeople, Amy’s parents and the media, launch into investigating her disappearance. Nick follows the traditional anniversary treasure hunt she has left him but it is not long before he realises the sinister side to the clues.

The novel is narrated by both Amy and Nick: Nick as he struggles in the aftermath of his wife’s disappearance, and Amy through diary entries since the day they met. The reader is pushed and pulled from one to the other, apparently given both viewpoints. However, in part two, the plot thickens. The reader is confronted with Amy after the disappearance. ‘Diary Amy’, it turns out, is only made up. We are assured that she will “sort this out: the true and the not true and the might as well be true”, but how are we to know whether or not to believe her?

A novel about reaching the truth, the facts of Amy’s disappearance, becomes an interrogation of what truth really means and whether or not we can ever really be certain of others’ thoughts. Flynn plays with the idea of truth in fiction on a new level; narrators are not just unreliable, hiding things and skewing events to their viewpoint, but narratives involve outright lies and fabrications so the reader is placed in the position of the police, the outsider, as well as the confidant. As Amy’s father stops himself from saying (because he thinks it sounds like only something someone in a movie would say), “I don’t know what to believe anymore”. Neither does the reader.

Gone Girl is certainly gripping and filled with shocks. It is a dark, disturbing story, full of psychological depth that leaves you with a bleak view of relationships. I found the characters increasingly unlikeable – Nick has been cheating on his wife for a year and tells unnecessary lies to the police; Amy frames him for murder and then commits murder herself. We also find out the false accusations she has made in the past to bring others down. Even the minor characters are not presented in a good light – the friends Amy makes at the cabins steal from her, her parents are pushy and self-absorbed, the neighbours are deluded and interfering.

Both Amy and Nick seem masters of deception and at points pretend to be someone else; we are shown the danger in doing so – how long can you pretend before you become the person you are pretending to be? Do we ever really see their ‘real’ characters, or do they only perform roles? We must also consider them as writers – both Amy and Nick at times have been writers for a living, and both have the ability to tell a good story, whether is it true or not. Isn’t fiction itself, after all, just ‘pretending’?

The end brings the promise of more nightmares, as Nick and Amy stay together to bring up their child. Despite all they have done to each other, Nick realises, slightly unrealistically I have to say,  “I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist” in the “never-ending war story of our marriage”. But it is Amy who is given the last word; she has not finished manipulating him, or us, yet.