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Reading THE LIE was one of those occasions where I longed for fluent German to be able to browse the book in the original and resolve whether the swampy prose was the fault of the writer or the translator. Susanne is a down-on-her-luck divorcee, desperate for a job so she can make ends meet. She encounters Nadia, who's her double and also seriously rich. So when Nadia suggests Suzanne takes her place for a weekend so she can sneak off with a lover, it looks like it's going to be easy money. After all, Nadia and her husband are on lousy terms, so it's not like Suzanne will be called on to make witty conversation… Except, that one weekend is followed by others, and Nadia is drawn into a complex and dangerous game. THE LIE is one of those books with a neat central plot line, but it singularly fails to deliver. If I hadn’t had it for review, it would have failed my 50-page test spectacularly! Inside the rambling and clumsy prose is a good idea being slowly suffocated. It's not helped either by the fact that Hammesfahr has a long cast list, few of whom – except for Suzanne – are more than cardboard cut-outs. And we rarely meet some of the key people who are mentioned frequently, which immediately disengages the reader. I suppose THE LIE is noir, in that it's dark, depressing and features characters you don't much care about. In someone like Barbara Vine's hands, it could have worked. But as it stands, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief once too often. The ending trails off with an egregious shift in point of view. By then it hardly mattered, sadly, as I'd pretty much lost interest in how the whole mess was resolved. THE LIE would have benefited by some seriously stringent editing and rewriting to extract the silk purse from a field of wandering swine…
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, December 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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