|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Following the work of a favorite author in this genre is often a matter of returning to well-loved characters acting predictably in a familiar setting. When it's done well, we enjoy each book as if we're meeting old friends and are getting to know them better; done poorly, it's the same as usual, warmed over in the microwave. Neither response is an option with a writer like Louise Welsh. Every one of her books is a surprise. NAMING THE BONES opens in a comic vein, with a bumbling academic hero who is pegging his career on writing a book about a poet who wrote little and died young. Because the one slim volume made a deep impression on Murray Watson, he has made the deceased poet his own project, but he's growing aware that it will be very difficult indeed to extract a book-length learned analysis from such slim pickings. He is also involved in an affair with a colleague, the wife of the department head, but it's beginning to dawn on him that she isn't interested in him for his looks or his charm. He's simply part of an obscure project of her own, and their liaisons are the stuff of French farce laced with something more desperate and complex. All in all, Murray's not a particularly winning hero at first, given to alternating bouts of anxiety and hubris, but Welsh slyly gives him enough doggedness and decency that he gradually wins us over. At the same time, she begins to paint the scene in darker and darker colors. When Murray travels north, to the island where the poet drowned, he leaves the depressing but well-trodden confines of academia and finds himself cut off from the familiar, in a rugged rural landscape where the weather can be brutal, the connection to the outer world depends on a ferry, and where the only way he can get a signal on his mobile is to scale a hill where he's buffeted and blinded by wind and rain. It's an uncompromising geography, and his sense of being cut off from normality helps him understand how isolation contributed a curious set of relationships that were tested there and which led to the events of the stormy night when Murray's poet drowned. Louse Welsh is a fine and confident writer who has, once again, caught me by surprise. She has also proven that it doesn't take a score of butchered victims or a loudly ticking clock to create a vivid and deeply disturbing sense of evil. In fact, the evil she presents is more unsettling than blood-spatter violence because she disarms us with wit and, when our defenses are down, draws us so very close to it. Whatever is in the water in Scotland is providing us with some of the most original and high-quality crime fiction on offer, and NAMING THE BONES provides one more fine example of it. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, February 2011
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
