About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP
by S J Watson
Black Swan, January 2012
384 pages
7.99 GBP
ISBN: 0552164135


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

A lot of praise has been lavished on this debut novel. It was a New York Times and a Sunday Times best seller and has won prizes, including one for crime thriller of the year. The film rights have been sold and there is even a trailer for the book, rather like a film trailer.

The beginning is promising. A woman wakes in a bedroom she doesn't recognize. Lying next to her is a man she doesn't recognize. He is middle-aged, grey-haired and wears a wedding ring. She gets up to go to the bathroom, looks in the mirror and finds that she has aged overnight and looks twenty-five years older than she actually is. When the man wakes he is quite aware of how shocked she must be and explains that she had lost her memory many years before. He tells her, however, that he is her husband, Ben, that he will look after her and that she has no need to worry. He also explains that he has to tell her this every day. She receives a telephone call from a man who claims to be her doctor and he persuades her that it might assist her recovery if she were to write a daily journal. He says that he would ring to remind her about it every morning. She agrees and is thus able to know what she has been doing from day to day.

The trouble is that what she writes doesn't give the impression of being a journal. Had it done so, of course, it would not have given the impression of being a novel. If she is to make sense of what she writes she has to read the whole of the journal every day. The time this would take, added to the time spent in writing more would have been considerably more than she has available, since she needs to keep it a secret from Ben, whom she does not entirely trust. In fact she spends an inordinate amount of time debating with herself whether she should trust him or not. She acquires evidence from her doctor that Ben had lied to her about the 'accident' which caused her to lose her memory but she doesn't know whether he did this in her interests or his own.

This routine of her waking in ignorance of who she is, the reminder telephone call, the locating and reading of the journal and the daily writing is repeated to the point where it is simply boring. As the novel nears its end it becomes impossible to sustain this journal stratagem and she is allowed to regain some of her memory. This is a relief because it is frequently unclear whether the narrative is a journal entry or an event/description in real time. It would certainly have been simpler - and in the end more convincing - for the story to have been told in the third person and the journal in the first.

As for the characters themselves, they are few and generally of little interest, the sole exception being the main character's old girlfriend, Claire. The manufactured plot is even more disappointing, with too many unlikely, if not impossible, things happening. There is certainly no surprise when the villain turns out to be precisely as expected. The ending is left - somewhat artificially - in the air, readers being invited, as it were, to reach their own conclusions. Perhaps they will simply be grateful that the book eventually reached its conclusion.

§ Arnold Taylor is a retired Examinations Board Officer, amateur writer and even more amateur bridge player.

Reviewed by Arnold Taylor, January 2012

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]