I first read Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn's debut novel from 2006, over a year ago and never got around to reviewing it. It is a slightly Gothic, psycI first read Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn's debut novel from 2006, over a year ago and never got around to reviewing it. It is a slightly Gothic, psychological thriller-crime-suspense novel set in the American Midwest. I'll be honest: I wouldn't have thought of reading this had I not (somewhat randomly) selected it as one of the texts for the Crime Fiction module I was about to teach. There is an excellent review of the book on , which explains much - and better than I could right now. (I'll admit it: I'm being super lazy in doing this!)
Camille Preaker is a hack journalist from Chicago who is sent by her editor back to her home town, the fictional Wind Gap in Missouri, because a little girl has gone missing and he wants their paper to be the first to break the story. One missing girl is hardly enough to catch anyone's interest in Chicago, but the previous year another girl was found murdered, her teeth pulled, and the case was never solved. Camille - our amateur sleuth - is less than keen to return. Her relationship with her mother, Adora, is one of strain and unmet expectations, while she barely knows her half-sister, thirteen-year-old Amma.
Adora is "old money"; she owns the large commercial pig farm and hog butchering factory, raking in over a million dollars a year in profits to live on in her Gothic Victorian mansion at the top of a steep hill. Camille, the child she had as a teenager to a man she never speaks of, was too hard to love; instead, Adora turned her attention onto Marian, her second, sickly child, until the girl died. Camille loved her sister, but Adora offered no comfort to the lonely child, choosing instead to shut herself up in her large bedroom with the famous ivory-tiled floor, accepting visitors to witness her grief but never helping her remaining child with hers. Into this repressive, tense household Camille reluctantly returns, fuelling her courage with alcohol and keeping her mutilated skin covered.
The town of Wind Gap is one of women, gossip and class division. It is a place where popularity is based on looks, conforming to dominant expectations of feminine behaviour, all represented by Flynn as problematic, inauthentic and even poisonous. I very nearly started talking about the outcome of the mystery plot here, before reminding myself that this is not the place. It tackles the repression that women willingly buy into and enforce, thus effectively policing themselves and so maintaining the patriarchal status quo. The idea that women, too, watch other women through the male gaze is prominent in Camille's observations and the various characters' treatment of each other. While I quite enjoyed the book the first time I read it, its dark, gritty side, the chilling nature of the murders and the motives behind them, and poor Camille's screwed-up life became less effective the more I read it - it was not a book that held up to a vigorous re-read. But I am drawn to confronting, disturbing books, and this was certainly one of those....more
I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped, partly because I was hoping it was more along the lines of speculative fiction (it certainly hinted at it!) I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped, partly because I was hoping it was more along the lines of speculative fiction (it certainly hinted at it!) and partly because I was reading a galley on my Kindle, and I struggle to interact with stories electronically. The other reason would be that I simply wasn't all that interested in the characters. Deenie is perhaps the central character, but her father, Tom - a teacher at her school - also gets his point-of-view chapters. His side story is his status as bachelor and a vague flirtation with the French teacher. Her older brother, Eli, gets some air time too. No one character was particularly well developed, and the shift between such different characters gave it a choppy, uneven feel.
The plot itself started strongly, and built great atmosphere, but fizzled all too soon. It became fairly predictable, or rather, the build-up at the start created high expectations that didn't hold. That said, I could have had a very different reading experience had I read this as an actual print book. The other issue is that, as a story about young adolescent girls and their complicated psychological make-up, I felt I'd read better, more thought-provoking stories. The Fever didn't add anything or teach me anything new. Overall, simply disappointing.
Read in February 2014. My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via Netgalley....more
Forty-something psychotherapist Jessica Mayhew has a successful practice in Cardiff, Wales; a handsome husband, Bob; and two beautiful daughters, NellForty-something psychotherapist Jessica Mayhew has a successful practice in Cardiff, Wales; a handsome husband, Bob; and two beautiful daughters, Nella and Rose. But appearances can be deceiving. At fifteen, Nella is at a difficult age and Jessica is finding it hard to keep the lines of communication open between them. And she's still trying to recover from learning that Bob had a one-night stand with a much younger woman while on a business trip in Europe a month ago.
On the day Jess's story starts, she meets a potential new client on his first appointment. Gwydion Morgan is a young and extremely handsome local actor, whose best known for his on-going role in a popular Welsh TV soap. His father is the renowned stage director, Evan Morgan, who is equally famous for his numerous affairs and dalliances with other women, while his wife, Arianrhod, once a beautiful actress, wastes away at the family home, a forbidding stone mansion on the rocky Welsh coast. Gwydion has no love for his father but is close to his mother, and no other siblings.
Gwydion comes to Jessica with a fairly typical button phobia, which is a concern now that he's been picked to star in a new costume-drama (the costume he'll have to wear will have numerous buttons). Then he opens up to her about a recurring nightmare he's been having, in which he's a terrified little boy trapped in a dark box. Each time he returns to her office, he recounts the dream as it progresses, and each time, Jessica is sure she thinks she knows where it is going.
As much as she tries, she can't quite keep her own, very human, sense of curiosity out of Gwydion's case. Her friend, an actress called Mari, once had an affair with Evan and imparts some random bits of gossip about the family. And when Jess agrees, against her own rules, to visit the Morgan home in person when Gwydion falls into a deep depression, she is taken on a tour of the cliff-top garden by Arianrhod. At the edge of the cliff, at the top of a steep flight of stairs cut into the rockface, she sees a plaque, written in Swedish, memorialising the death of a young, pretty Swedish backpacker who drowned there.
As the Morgan family's secrets come bubbling to the surface, Jess gets more and more deeply involved in uncovering the truth in the hope of helping Gwydion recover and move on. But all is not as it seems with the Morgans, and Jess is not as in-control of the case as she believes.
I'm a bit torn over this one. While it had many qualities of good writing: swift, smooth, consistent pacing, a well-developed protagonist, some atmosphere and enough details to keep me interested, it was a bit predictable and a bit thin, plot-wise.
The setting - the Welsh coast, in particular - was a good one, and lively for the imagination. There was some atmosphere, but not as much as I would have liked; not as much as would have added tension and real suspense to the story.
Jessica was an interesting character, intelligent and honourable but flawed in the sense that she's a bit over-confident in her own analytical abilities and her own sense of righteousness, and she makes mistakes. She can be a bit unlikeable at times, which actually made me like her more because it made her feel more human. She could be surprisingly slow on the uptake at times, despite being intelligent overall, and she came across as rather cold and unfriendly. The reasons why Bob had a brief affair are hinted at, and as much as it doesn't excuse it, Jess has something to do with it. Her analysis of her own marital difficulties is patchy, and no wonder: it's all very well to look deep into someone else's problems while they sit on your couch, and discreetly guide them to the answers buried in their own minds, but quite another thing to accurately and honestly reflect on yourself. It takes Jess quite a while to realise that, and in the meantime - I can hardly believe it - I actually felt slightly sorry for Bob. Sorry for him in that he's a bit of a pathetic figure (anytime a 50+ year old man shags a 20-something woman, it's a bit sad, really. Mid-life crisis and all that), but also sorry for him because he could use a therapist himself, no doubt.
I am always very fascinated by the descriptions of therapy. Never having attended any kind of therapy session myself, I feel like a real voyeur, peeping in on someone else's. And it speaks to our all-too-human curiosity as to what's going on in other people's lives, partly to see what we can learn about coping techniques for ourselves. I studied some Freud at uni, in a couple of English courses, and was not impressed, but while his ideas were a bit ludicrous at times, I can see the merit in the principals of psychotherapy for some people, at least in the way Jessica works with her clients. As in Liane Moriarty's excellent novel, , I love getting that intimate access to a therapist's room, and hearing about the processes behind it.
But the plot, oh dear the plot. It really was rather predictable, and Jessica's family drama with Nella was more interesting to me than the murder mystery. It just felt a bit too contrived, a bit too convenient, and a bit too flawed. The concept for the set-up - which I don't want to explain as it would spoil the story, and I don't like giving spoilers if I can help it - seemed flimsy to me, and too obvious. After all, Jessica's dealing with a whole family of actors here, which she notes in the beginning and then forgets, so dazzled is she by Gwydion's beautiful face. (Was it just me or was the flirtation between them just plain creepy?)
As far as a quick mystery read goes, this was certainly quick. As far as a satisfying, suspenseful thriller goes, it was decidedly lacking. I didn't wholly dislike it, for the reasons mentioned above, but by the time I got to the ending I had rather lost interest in the whole family-secret-murder-mystery plot, and just wanted to hear more about human nature and Jessica's internal analysis.
My thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book via TLC Book Tours. ...more
Sarah Avery has returned home to Tasmania in secret, silent disgrace. She's broken up with her boyfriend and quit her job at a fish farm in QueenslandSarah Avery has returned home to Tasmania in secret, silent disgrace. She's broken up with her boyfriend and quit her job at a fish farm in Queensland, and is back in time for Christmas. Her family has a beach shack in the isolated Bay of Fires national park and head there every year for Christmas and New Year's. Her parents are there: Philippa, or "Flip" as she's known, a pharmacist; and Dr John Avery, a history professor at the university. Her younger sister Erica as well - a flight attendant, pretty and a bit vapid. The Bay of Fires village is a small one, consisting of a guest house made from a converted Nissen hut; three beach shacks and a shop; the Shelley's holiday house; and a campground. The Avery's own one shack; the one closer to the guest house belongs to Flip's best friend, Pam, and her husband Don; while the blue one farther away belongs to Roger Coker, a strange fisherman who lives there year-round with his cats.
On the day after Boxing Day, Roger discovers the body of a dead woman on the beach: topless, wearing a red polka-dot bikini, her body covered in gashes and partially eaten by sea creatures. Sarah, going to see, recognises the woman: a Swiss tourist called Anja who was staying at the guest house. It's clear to everyone in the community that Anja must have been murdered, probably by the same psycho who is behind the earlier disappearance of Chloe Crawford, a teenager who was holidaying with her family. Almost instantly many of the assorted holidayers and campers point their fingers at Roger, the oddball, the freak, as the guilty party. Personal, small-minded judgements against each other begin to fly as the community starts to turn on itself out of suspicion and fear.
The day after the discovery, a journalist from a local paper arrives for an extended stay. Hall Flynn is in his forties and single, a bad driver who can only sleep with a woman when he's drunk. He takes a shine to Sarah, who is the first woman he's slept with, drunk, in a long time who he'd like to spend more time with. Sarah becomes slightly obsessed with the mystery, and shares her theories with Hall, but she's prickly and hard to get to know.
Sarah has her own issues to contend with. There's the ugly truth of her breakup with Jake, her heavy drinking and her growing fear that she's a violent person. Her opinion of herself is sinking, especially after she wakes up on Boxing Day morning in the sand, lying in a pool of vomit with her fly undone and the last thing she can remember is picking up seventeen-year-old Sam Shelley and letting him have a drink. She doesn't know what happened but she fears the worst, and she fears the others in the bay finding out - especially his clingy mother, Simone, an American woman who runs a successful furniture business and has the only posh, new beach "shack" in the area.
There aren't many suspects in such a small area, but both Hall and Sarah contemplate them all while the community turns on itself, tensions run high and Roger is targeted. These are people Sarah's known all her life; what will she do with the truth when she learns it?
Mystery novels are not my usual fare - it's one of the few genres I don't generally read, with the exception of a few literary mysteries like this one, from time to time - so I can't really compare this to anything else. However, I absolutely love reading books set in my home state, and Poppy Gee hasn't written some bland generic novel here. Her debut is intelligent, literary, nuanced and deeply embedded in the local scenery. It touches on a range of issues, prominent among them the environment and environmental practices, fishing infringements, sensationalising media, scapegoating (especially of defenceless, vulnerable individuals who perhaps suffer from an intellectual disability of some kind), the appropriation of Aboriginal lands by white graziers, the ethics and morals around sound reporting, alcoholism, violence, marital woes, sexism, feminism and judgemental women. That might seem like a long list, but it all comes out through the narrative with natural ease.
I really enjoyed Sarah as a character. She was a woman in her thirties struggling with the decisions she'd made, struggling to understand what kind of person she was and whether she even liked herself. She was intelligent but moody, a bit of a hard-arse who really, secretly, wanted to be loved and cared for by a man she could respect and be an equal to, but she doesn't know how to open up. So used is she to working with - and being the boss of - all-male crews, and absorbing the sexism and crude opinions that come with them, that she's quite the opposite of girly-girl Erica. Sarah is athletic and very strong, and because she doesn't dress up or wear make-up or make her hair pretty, she's been mistaken as a lesbian more than once.
Hall seems an unlikely partner for Sarah, at first. He's no alpha-male, no macho Aussie bloke. He's a good reporter saddled with a bad editor, he's smart and not unattractive, but after his girlfriend of many years left him for his best friend, he's been unable to have meaningful relationships with any woman - and not interested in it either. He drinks, too, and smokes, and his driving made me cringe, but I really liked him. He seemed so down-to-earth, honest, not pretentious or posturing. Both Hall and Sarah are misfits in their small universes, suffering from insecurities and a lack of confidence, and I couldn't help think that they'd be great together - if they could give up their silly insecurities.
The mystery side of the story played out nicely, albeit slowly. This is a mystery narrative that revolves around the characters, getting to know them, learning and then unlearning them as new evidence comes to light. It's the kind of mystery that is designed to make you suspect almost all the characters at one point or other. The actual truth would have been anti-climactic but was made more interesting by the ethical and moral dilemma it threw up at Hall and Sarah.
Because I don't generally read mystery or crime or thriller novels, I can't really give you a sense for how successful it was as a mystery-suspense novel, only as a literary novel. I can say that there were a few scenes that were nicely creepy, some that were full of tension that would come out of nowhere and unsettle you nicely. While I did find that the plot was at times a little slow and uneventful, for a literary mystery-suspense story, it worked quite well and at a more intellectual level. Gee unwound the story of Sarah's Queensland disgrace slowly, letting readers balance the new information with a growing sense of Sarah as a person, which enables her to remain a sympathetic character.
The landscape itself was the strongest element to the whole book. The descriptions of the location where vivid and realistic, and peopled as it was with distinctly Australian characters, the world of Bay of Fires came vibrantly to life - which is what you want when your mystery novel depends on the interactions between the characters to maintain both the mystery and the suspense. While at times Gee's language was a little awkward and slowed me down, there were also some really beautiful lines as well, like "At the bar, a flannelette row of farm workers peered from beneath caps." [p.158] Gee's love for the real Bay of Fires Conservation Area (which does not, in reality, have a campground or guest house or shop as it does in the novel, only some shacks) comes across strongly, and the novel carries with it a real sense of place.
The mystery of the two missing women is loosely based (inspired, but not a recreation of) two real-life cases: the disappearance of German woman in 1993 and the death of Italian in 1995, tourists to the Bay of Fires whose cases were never solved - though in 2011 with information on the Grundwaldt case. In a place like Tasmania, with its peaceful, beautiful scenery and small, half-a-million population, the two cases gripped everyone's imaginations and are yet to be forgotten. In this way, too, Poppy Gee's novel will resonate with Australian readers at a more personal level.
Overall, I very much enjoyed this book, which I read as a literary novel more than a mystery - the mystery propels the story forward but it is the stylistic writing and the incredibly well-captured characters that keep you reading. It's gritty and realistic, and any time you add sinister tensions to a scenic landscape, you're going to get a wonderfully creepy atmosphere. There aren't many stories set in Tasmania, and in general, Australian authors seem overly conscious of the "cultural cringe" and avoid that sense of familiarity with location that, conversely, American authors embrace so whole-heartedly. Personally, I love reading stories set in places I recognise, and have lived in. Gee incorporated plenty of local sites and landmarks and places, without a trace of the dreaded cultural cringe, and for that I thank her. I'm very interested in what Poppy Gee writes next, because she's a talent to watch out for.
On a side note, I was a bit put-off by something about this book: this is an Australian writer, the story is set here, my edition was published in the UK, and yet the spelling is American. It was very jarring to read "color", "harbor", "tire" and so on, when everything else was so distinctly Australian. A pet peeve of mine....more
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