With her latest novel, Katherine Faulkner, the British author of Greenwich Park and The Other Mothers, offers us another thriller — one that twists and turns through the mysterious behaviours of its seemingly ordinary central characters.
The novel opens with a murder. Alice, a happily married mother, kills a knife-wielding man who breaks into her house and proceeds to the room where her young child is watching a movie with a playmate, the daughter of Alice’s new friend Stella.
There’s some confusion between Alice and Stella as to whether the intruder shouts “Is he here?” or “Is she here?” as he pushes past the women, before Alice hits him from behind with a metal chair.
The Break-In
Anxious that the murder will not be ruled as self-defence, Alice searches online for information about the intruder. She discovers he lived with his mother, Linda, and that her address is nearby.
Although the police have described the break-in as a random and unfortunate event — and the intruder as a troubled stranger — Alice remains deeply unsettled, in part because she killed another woman’s child.
The novel’s suspense builds as Alice secretly decides to pay Linda a visit. This clandestine act gives rise to others, and Alice becomes consumed by the mysteries surrounding the break-in.
The online comments that accompany the news reports about her only intensify her obsession. Parenting her daughter becomes increasingly challenging.
The nanny seems to know something.
Motherhood is a central preoccupation of the novel. Alice, Stella and Linda bring different perspectives, as each character struggles in her own way with the responsibilities that motherhood entails. It’s supposed to make sense that Alice acts in defence of her daughter, but she never feels right about it.
“She can’t reconcile her image of herself with the fact of what she has done. She doubts it will ever settle, this cognitive dissonance that makes herself feel unreal to her now,” Faulkner writes.
Alice works in art restoration, and there’s a great sequence involving her discovery of a painting beneath a painting — a latent image that she tries to uncover and restore. Surrounded by people who seem to be hiding things from her, Alice’s work and life begin to reflect one another.
Most of the novel is told from her perspective, through an omniscient narrator. This is an interesting stylistic move — although we have access to Alice’s thoughts, she is held at a slight distance. The impression we get is of a woman stumbling through often-misguided decisions, miring herself in troubling situations.
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The only character who narrates in the first-person is Linda, and she tells her story in a direct, matter-of-fact manner. Her voice is distinct and sympathetic.
Also well-drawn is the character of Stella. A hardworking journalist and single mother, Stella is tasked with digging up information about the break-in for Alice.
Stella comes across as far more level-headed than Alice, even as she disparages her ex-husband, her child’s deadbeat dad. “Some men are toxic,” she announces to Alice, “and the world would be a far better place for our daughters if they didn’t exist.”
At almost 400 pages, this novel may look lengthy, but it’s fast-paced and suspenseful. The secrets that encircle and torment Alice remain intriguing from start to finish.
Dana Medoro is a professor at the University of Manitoba.