Right, first problem: the book is written in third person present tense
(‘she sighs..., she eats..., she puts...’). I daresay the author has
perfectly sensible reasons for this stylistic choice, but I really hate
it. It grates on me, and gets between me and the story. I don’t know how
commonplace this is, but it feels pretentious. And even though I sort
of got used to it, every few pages there'd be another phrase that felt
awkward, and I'd get annoyed all over again.
For those who can
put up with it, though, this turns out to be a hugely enjoyable book.
It's a fairly conventional mystery - ten years ago a child vanished,
never to be seen again, and now another child has vanished - a plot
which must have been done, with variations, a million times over the
years. What makes this one different is the setting - a very evocative
piece of eastern England, with salt marshes, an eerily empty landscape
and lots and lots of weather, lashing rain, howling gales, crashing
thunderstorms, you name it.
The other big attraction is the main
character, Ruth Galloway, a large, frumpy (and not bothered about it)
archaeologist, more interested in her prehistoric finds than in other
people. Ruth is intelligent, self-sufficient and independent, needs her
cats more than she needs a man, and when she gets into trouble she's
perfectly capable of getting herself out of it. Thank goodness for a
strong female character who's not skinny or beautiful or unnaturally
competent - you know, just a perfectly normal woman. She has her moments
of self-doubt, of course, but when she's down she's just as likely to
turn to a female friend as to a bloke. And she's funny, in a genuinely
laugh-out-loud way. I totally loved her.
The policeman on the
case, Harry Nelson, is a slightly generic grumpy cop, but he too is very
likeable, in his way, and the relationship between the two is very
believable. The other characters don't have much screen time so they
tend to be a bit cardboard, but they aren't over-the-top cartoonish, and
even the walk-on parts are fine. And the plot burbles along nicely.
Now,
the second big problem is the ending, on several levels. I know it's
standard nowadays for this sort of story to reach a climax with a hugely
dramatic incident, with the protagonist in all sorts of danger, but
honestly, that gets terribly tedious. There's actually a lot to be said
for the old fashioned approach: Hercules Poirot exercises his leetle
grey cells, summons all the suspects into the drawing room and reveals
with a flourish that Lady Cynthia and the housemaid are long-lost twins
separated at birth, that the mysterious woman on the landing was in fact
the Honourable Hugh in a blonde wig trying to find the secret room, and
the dagger was hidden in the aspidistra pot all the time. But no, what
we get here is half the characters milling improbably about in a storm
in the middle of the night. Yawn. And as for the big
look-what-I've-found reveal - no. Just no. Completely impossible
location.
And yet, despite these issues, I thoroughly enjoyed
this. Partly it's the character of Ruth herself (and honestly, I totally
identified with her, in innumerable little ways, and I rarely do that
with fictional characters). Partly it's the humour, which improves any
book, in my opinion. And partly it's that indefinable something that
makes a story completely believable - characters react to events in a
normal way, don't make stupid decisions, ask all the right questions,
agonise over the things that really should worry them (but not too much)
and in general behave like normal rational human beings. There are more
books in the series, which I shall definitely be getting. Four stars.
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