Right, now then first things first... I think it's Gillian with a 'hard' G as in... as in... oh something like Gone and Girl isn't it ??
I do like to get these things right before telling you that finally I have read Gone Girl, and long after everyone else was touting it as the 2012 Thriller of the Year. Described as extraordinarily good... baffling... disturbing... must-read, dark and deeply intelligent... twisted and compelling.. the full-spectrum of marital dysfunction... terrifying... stomach-churning turns... chilling... and so the accolades go on and on.
All enough for me to avoid reading until things have calmed down a bit.
I finally capitulated in W.H.Smith's in Launceston where I had gone to buy my BBC Proms Programme, because I am armchair promming again this year (unless it's Wagner's Ring Cycle, in which case I will be watering the garden instead). The Devon Libraries Summer Read is M.L.Stedman's The Light Between Oceans, and so many of you had recommended it in comments that when I cast eyes on a copy I subliminally remembered your favourable words and picked it up.
Then the fatal and irresistible sticky label, 'Buy one Get Another for £1'.
I quickly spy 'Gone Girl' and think 'Oh why not, everyone else has, it's summer holiday (at home) time.' So I leave the shop with my booty, having spent far more than I meant to, and for some reason only show Bookhound the two bargain books on growing roses that I have found in the charity shop.
I am always impressed with these lists of Summer Holiday Reading from the great and the good who reckon this will be their moment to read Moby Dick. The Guardian have a fair old selection for the Best Holiday Reads and I bow to the choices and wish them all well having made so many mistakes of my own in years gone by. I somehow always over-estimate the amount of reading brain that will accompany me on any holiday, or the depths of understanding it will be possible to summon up from the comfort of the gravity recliner.
Now this is not to say that you don't need 'brain' to read Gone Girl, and it is far from a shallow read, but I do think it made perfect page-turning hot-weather reading for me last week. The sort of book you can pick up when you want to, and put down when you have to (even though you may not want to) and pick up again where you left off, racing through if the suspense is killing you, and all with that delicious sense of voyeuristic readerly anticipation and intrigue that I am not sure Moby Dick might hold for me.
Amy and Nick are celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary, having down-sized from the luxury life in New York to the more modest environs of North Carthage, Missouri, ostensibly to be nearer to Nick's ageing and ailing parents, and to support his twin sister Margo in caring for them. Margo is known as Go and it might have been page three hundred and something before I stopped myself jumping and asking 'Go where? ' every time I read it. All is not well in the marriage, and whilst brother and sister run a bar together, Amy does... well Amy is a girl of means so she doesn't have to do an awful lot which, as will become clear, gives her far too much thinking time.
Into the equation leap Amy's 'creative-genius' parents who have reached the pinnacle of the childhood exploitation of their beloved daughter by making a fortune out of a children's book series called Amazing Amy. It sounds a bit like Topsy and Tim (remember them) with the added dimension of a multiple-choice moral dimension quiz, but at least Topsy and Tim were imaginary ... weren't they?? It stands to reason I suppose, that if you write countless different lives for your own child they may just grow up a little confused about who they really are, and which life they should be leading. Maybe they might even feel the need eventually to invent and write a life for themselves, even rebel a bit and give the wrong answer to the questions.
By page twenty-seven Amy has gone. Nick comes home on the day of his anniversary to find the house ominously empty, and Amy missing, so no messing, the book does what is says in the title, and when I was choosing my bookmark, this card from Dennis Severs' house in Spitalfields seemed spot on for many reasons.
What follows, as he becomes prime suspect, is Nick's day to day account, interspersed with extracts from Amy's diary, until eventually the stories converge and build up for the big mid-book twist much-lauded in the puffs. Apparently I was supposed to 'drop the book' which I didn't, I actually hung onto it more tightly, because just as I thought this might all be running out of steam Gillian (G-illian) Flynn turns the screws and ratchets up the action, and I doubt many people would set the book aside at this point and not have to race through to the end to see what happens.
And of course now I can't really say another word for fear of spoilers, so just a few observations...
Suffice to say this is indeed a toxic marriage...
The lengths people will go to to destroy each other knows no bounds...
Sociopaths are seriously terrifying people, I have worked with one, in a doctor's surgery (not a doctor, thankfully) and I almost came a cropper for a while before I had them sussed.
If you have read it, Margaret Atwood's essay Spotty-Handed Villainesses may come to mind...
'Let me define a thoroughly evil person as one who intends to do evil, and purely for selfish reasons. The Queen in Snow White would fit that...'
Selfishness is rife on all sides in Gone Girl, you would be hard-pushed to squeeze more into a single novel...
An assumption of stupidity in others is an arrogance, it happens a lot amongst the characters in Gone Girl...
Unreliable narrators are the best sort aren't they... and that constant dilemma of believing or not...
Improbable events become entirely plausible when the reader is at the mercy of a galloping plot...
Books which steer the reader towards a wish/need for one ending, and then offer them something completely different, are the best sort too. I'd put money on 99% of readers wanting a particular ending and I was one of them. Gone Girl really made me think about revenge...and why... to what purpose.
Margaret Atwood makes another interesting point and one of relevance to Gone Girl...
'Female bad characters can also act as keys to doors we need to open. and as mirrors in which we can see more than just a pretty face. They can be explorations of moral freedom - because everyone's choices are limited, and women's choices have been more limited than men's, but that doesn't mean women can't make choices.''
There are many moments of choice for both Amy and Nick in the book, and it has been interesting, in the days since I finished reading, to compare and contrast those in the light of Margaret Atwood's essay...
'Such characters can pose the question of responsibility, because if you want power you have to accept responsibility, and actions produce consequences.'
Books which leave a reader with something to worry about at the end are interesting as well. I had to keep telling myself 'These are not real people,' but if you have read Gone Girl you will know to what I am referring, and I'll bet you may share that anxiety too...
As I read I was thinking 'film' but with no knowledge of anything pending, now of course I see they are all way ahead of me, too late to buy the rights, Reese Witherspoon was in there like a shot, the cameras will be rolling and everyone is favouring Ben Affleck to play Nick. As for Amy, some poor actor is going to have to psyche herself into the part and it may be one that never quite leaves her side thereafter. Twenty or so years ago it would have been a shoo-in for Michael Douglas, Glen Close and the Gone Girl equivalent of Fatal Attraction's boiled bunny.
So there you have it, a perfect holiday book and finally I am on-trend (almost) with my reading and, in the aftermath of Emma with a funny feeling that Jane Austen would have relished this one and thought up some really good new plot twists for Lizzie and Mr Darcy.
Anyone else as on-trend as me with Gone Girl and if so I would love to know your thoughts.
And while we are on the subject, any other psychological frillers ( as we call them here) especially those with women behaving badly, that would keep us glued to the gravity recliner ??
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