Review: The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

This month's book-club book!

Okay, full disclosure. I wanted to hate this one. Since I saw it advertised, I've been thinking of it as The Girl with the Perfectly Reasonable Hatred of Being Infantalised When She is Actually a Grownassed Woman. I came to it with the narrowed eyes of suspicion, the acerbic comment of dismissal already framed and sitting on my tongue.

When you call a woman (and with a divorce, a round of failed IVF and a drink problem, there is no 'girl' about Rachel) a girl, you are presenting the kind of attitude towards women and their problems that wrecked Gone Girl for me. I was expecting another round of 'psycho ex-girlfriends' and false rape accusations - which is, I admit, generally better than the tough-but-vulnerable manic pixieness you get when men use such titles.

I wanted SO BAD not to like this book.

But I'm sorry to tell you that it's brilliant.

No, it's not the best book I've read this year, but it is a gripping, sickening and intelligent thriller. The characters are complex, realistic and never entirely likeable. Their problems are real, and - even if you hate them - you will pity them. Their suffering wrenches through the novel with a powerful 'here but for the grace of god'. It's the stuff of nightmare, but the worst nightmares, the kind that bubble so close to the surface of our experience of the world. It presents, terrifyingly, the real stakes of living as a woman in the patriarchy, and the way that you will often find yourself at the mercy of men, with no guarantee of their good intentions.

I struggled, I admit, at points with some of the set-up (spoilers, sorry) - the plot relying on a couple of tropes we could do without for the next eight decades - and found the ending possibly a little sensationalist. The mystery aspect itself was competent and well structured. I admit, I sussed it a little before time, but only due to certain personal reasons - my suspicions did not cement until the proper moment, when the careful laying of clues coalesced into certainty. One aspect of this was especially well presented, and actually did catch me by surprise.

The real draw of The Girl on the Train, however, is not its mystery, but the claustrophobic, almost unhealthy intensity of emotion within it, and on that count it hits every single mark. Fantastic, and well worth your time.

What I've been reading: The Severed Streets, Good Omens and, *sigh* Gone with the Wind

YAY!

Yay! I've been waiting for this!

So. The Severed Streets, by Paul Cornell, is the sequel to 2012's London Falling and is part of a genre that I have taken to calling the supernatural-police-procedural-set-in-London. Among this rather niche interest group, Cornell is probably my favourite as he is the darkest, most merciless, and the most likely to give you nightmares

To be more specific, both books follow the experiences of a group of Metropolitan Police Officers after the investigation of a drugs bust grants them the Sight and reveals a whole other, much scarier side, to the London they know. Their remit becomes the investigation of crimes that have 'impossible' aspects to them, 'impossible' because the suspects or motives involved concern this other, invisible London. In The Severed Streets this refers to the Ripper, a killer who travels among the protests and riots of 'The Summer of Blood', able to walk through walls, to create riots, a Jack-the-Ripper whose victims are rich, white men.

I think what I like best about these books is the powerlessness of the main characters. They are thrown into a big, terrifying supernatural world, of whose rules they know nothing, and in which the abilities they have been granted seem woefully inadequate. The real sense of fear and frustration which pervades these books makes the narrative race along with an almost hallucinatory intensity, something even more pronounced here than in London Falling. Cornell is also more openly political in this novel, clearer about his intentions and themes, better at balancing the different moods and experiences of the characters, working overall with an assurance that makes The Severed Streets far stronger than its prequel.

Still, much as I love it, I would say that the very pace of the novel can work against it. As well as telling a breakneck mystery/thriller, Cornell is constructing a very complex world - as such it is possible to get lost and confused, to miss vital bits of exposition. I would advise anyone who hasn't read London Falling to read it first, and anyone who has read it to reread it before embarking on The Severed Streets. And, if you like your crime/horror fiction intense and gruesome, I'd suggest you do so asap.

Okay, that was a long review. So, let's not talk about Gone with the Wind, suffice to say I haven't finished it yet and it doesn't look like it's getting any better. It's making me think of this parable.

Much loved, as you can see.

Indeed, on the theme of heaven and hell, there is Good Omens, an absolute masterpiece from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. If you haven't read this, all your friends are laughing at you behind your back. It tells of the end of the World, the rise of the anti-Christ, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the battle between Heaven and Hell and it's hilarious. Smart, sharp and incredibly silly, its sheer awesome has not diminished in the 24 years since its publication (although it has dated a little).

If you have read it before and you're feeling down, maybe read it again. That's what I'm doing. Lovely stuff.

Review: Susan Hill, The Various Haunts of Men: Pulling Punches and Killing the Spare.

It's very rare for a book to make me cry. It's very rare for something even to come close.

Same goes for films, television, whatever. There are a few things, there are moments when I get mawkish and sentimental,¹ there are the few guaranteed tearjerkers in the world, but when my contemporaries were sobbing buckets over poor old Cedric Diggory, the best I could manage was a shrug. “Kill the spare”, splat – well, quite. If you insist.

In fact, I've always had a bit of beef with J.K about that whole business. Sure, she killed Sirius Black, and she killed him totally unfairly², but in the last book she promised us a Weasley. Go on, then, I thought – she's not going to do for Ron, but Ginny maybe? Or Arthur. Definitely Arthur.

Fred? You what?

Okay. Better Fred than George³. You whack the Weasley who's got a double? What a bloody cop out.

Now, this, I'll admit, makes it sound as though I've a vendetta against everyone's favourite red-headed clan, but I've not. I like the Weasleys. Sod it, I like Fred. I'm talking about storytelling. From book four onwards, Harry Potter is filled with a cast of likeable, entertaining supporting characters who are murdered in the gradually escalating bloodbath that culminates in the battle for Hogwarts. Not Harry though. Not Ron, or Hermione or Hagrid. Not even Ginny, or Neville or Dean. No, it's Cedric, Sirius, Dumbledore, Dobby, Tonks, Lupin, Fred - everyone outside our enchanted little circle of main characters and their immediate friends. Flat-pack tragedy. Kill the spare.

If you had asked me who my favourite, favourite writer was when I was twelve years old, my response would have been without hesitation. Robin Jarvis. No, he's not as good a writer as Garner, nor as clever as Pullman, but he taught me one very valuable thing about storytelling.

Don't kill the spare.

No, wait, scrap that. Don't just kill the spare.

For those of you who aren't acquainted with Jarvis' work and doubt the veracity of this statement, Jarvis' best known series can be summarised thus: a faintly mythic bloodbath inhabited by anthropomorphic animals.

You got a favourite character? It's dead⁴. A favourite place? Razed. A favourite people? Massacred. There was a kind of glee in it, murder, murder, murder, mayhem, black magic and death. No, Jarvis wasn't killing his darlings, dear, he was killing yours. Of course, it wouldn't have worked if it had just been unremitting blackness⁵ - he played the heartstrings, but not too much. He pulled no punches.

Sometimes, though, he pulled something else, though: a fast one.

Which brings me onto our next point. Fast ones are great. I love fast ones. The end of The Whitby Series is one hell of a fast one. In fact, it's a whole sequence of fast ones. The Alchemist's Cat is still, to my mind, one of the best fast ones ever pulled. And sometimes the fast one is the way out – don't just kill the spare, kill the darling. Then bring them back.

They're great, fast ones. Every now and then they do stop something turning into an outright rout. They bring a little bit of lightness, of joy back to your reader's world. They promise to drive the nail in, to make the incision, only to pull back at the last minute. It's okay, chaps. Everything will be just peachy.

Which is all well and good, but they undermine what I see to be the first rule of storytelling. Don't try to please your reader. You are not a little child, trying to persuade a strict caregiver to provide sweets. You do not need to pander to their little whims. You are a writer, FFS. Within the little confines of your book, your world, your script, your whatever, you are GOD, and you do not need to be a nice one. When you pull a fast one, your readers should feel nothing other than sheer, bleeding relief. “Thank fuck,” should be what they are whispering to themselves. “I care. I care. I care.” And to get that reaction, you cannot pull them all the time⁶.

That's the thing about fast ones. They are throwing your reader the sponge, giving them the sticking plaster. They are kissing them, making it all better. If you always do it, bring your character to the edge of jeopardy, and pull them back at the last minute, your readers won't believe harm can really come to them. Your readers will slip inside a cosy little fantasy where everything will be okay. You stop being a cruel and implacable God and become a parent – scooping your reader up before they get to where the real darkness lives.

Don't do this. Do not get sentimental, do not make the red jerseys. Simply kill! Kill! KILL!

Ahem.

Sorry.

Which brings me to Susan Hill. She knows what its like, the punches are the things that she does not pull. I was never expecting any tenderness. About five chapters into The Various Haunts of Men I said to myself, “If she does not kill Character X, I am going to be so disappointed.” Character X was charming, lovable, even. Character X was engaging, sympathetic, central. Character X was not the spare.

By the end of the novel, I was begging for her to pull a fast one. Let X off, I prayed, just this once.

But she did not.

And I nearly cried.

Now that, my fine friends, is excellent storytelling.

1Branagh's Love's Labours Lost being a case in point.

2Not so much that she killed him, more that she couldn't think of anything else to do with him first.

3 Would anyone even have noticed had it been George?

4Except in the rare instance where it is the traitor who causes everyone else's death. But there you go.

5Although I'm not saying he wasn't prepared to give that a try.

6I'm looking at you, Steven Moffat.