|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Shona Sandison, who first appeared in GOLDENACRE, is a hard-bitten Scottish journalist who stumbles on a story when she travels to attend a friend's wedding. The night before the ceremony, as the guests celebrate in a bar, Shona gets a breath of air on the roof of their hotel and witnesses a suicide. A man whom the bride-to-be had grown up with was acting strangely and muttering odd phrases before he threw himself onto the rocks below. She saw he had puzzling tattoos covering his chest – an odd assortment that made no sense.
Sensing a story, she travels to the small village in northern England where her friend had grown up and where the dead man had been in a small class of students who had grown close in their final year, bonding over a game with a Ouija board that grew serious. Shona tracks down the remaining members of that class: a rising Tory politician, a woman who left for London and a new life, and some who stayed behind, including Shona's bed-and-breakfast owner and a back-to-the-earth woman who keeps chickens, raises vegetables, and smokes weed. They're all scarred by their past, and by the night when one of the class, the brother of the woman whose wedding was interrupted, walked away into the woods and was never seen again.
The rising politician plays a significant role in the story. He's a member of that brash new ultra-conservatism that rallies supporters through a toxic combination of a mythical English past, hatred of immigrants, and loud bad-boy behavior that enables his followers' overt bigotry. It would seem at times an over-the-top portrayal, if daily headlines didn't regularly top fiction. The adolescent fascination with the occult persists in his politics, just as Nordic myth and occult beliefs shaped Nazism.
It's not surprising that the author was a journalist for many years, the experience giving Shona's frustrated competitiveness a fierce edge. It's also won't surprise readers to learn he has a volume of poetry coming out. His descriptions are odd and lyrical, vivid and surprising. One enormous man is described as having clenched hands "as big as babies" and another has "eyes like dried-up puddles on a sunless day, lips as thin as hair." The landscape of the north of England is palpable and rich with elusive meaning.
As a protagonist, Shona Sandison is both difficult to like and hard to resist. She's profane, snarky, and often mean to people doing her a kindness. She's worried about her ailing father, but cruel to the neighbor who is taking care of him while she's away. She takes advantage of the photographer she works with and never has a kind word. But she has a way of coaxing stories out of people and, with her prickly empathy, is rarely wrong about what drives them.
Miller weaves a rich tapestry and leaves a lot of threads loose at the end, but it's an engrossing trip accompanied by a writer who has a wild imagination and a way with words.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, April 2024
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
