Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Four
disparate families are involved in this story; they are connected by a figure
called Joe, and overseen by a presence that could be a nascent god (or possibly
the author) called the Observer who records and simplifies actions, people,
meaning. He – it, at first startling, even resented, becomes an endearing
feature, keeping the reader on an even keel. Which is helpful, for the suspense
is acute, involving as it does, young girls and bad men.
Concerning
the families, at the start the first is fleeing from their remote house in
upstate New York only to be caught, tortured and shot. The five-year-old
daughter goes missing, the killers are never apprehended.
Twelve
years later a second family arrives, to strip and restore the same vandalized
house: Karl, avant-garde sculptor and philanderer, Eleanor, his novelist wife,
and 12-year-old Irina: loved and loving, a precocious writer herself and
equally at home with the internet. In no time she has researched the old murder
and has started to chat – on-line and anonymously – with other aficionados of
the case. In fact she becomes so obsessed with the fate of the missing child
survivor that she projects its grown image on Sam, a teenager she meets in town.
Sam is
another kind of survivor, having taken over her brother’s cannabis business
while he serves a stretch in the local jail. She is street-wise, amoral, canny,
but amused by Irina, curious and happy to go along with the girl’s fantasy,
coolly accepting Karl’s request that she babysit his daughter leaving him free
to get stoned in his studio. Eleanor, mother and wife, knowing herself dying of
cancer, has left the woods for New York, ostensibly to sell her latest novel to
her agent but in reality to punish her husband who, not content with cannabis,
is indulging in his latest affair.
The
last family centres on Louis: a most reluctant associate of the terrifying Joe.
This pair have been intermittently present since the start, the Observer,
god-like, observing their interaction like an entomologist studying two insects,
but seeming to sheer away from Joe on his own, concentrating rather on Louis: in his carpet factory, with his family where
his anorexic wife and pubescent daughter are glued to a computer, fascinated by
ghoulish details of that old murder in the house in the woods. Now by way of
that dangerous chat room this has been identified along with its new occupants
and their relationship with Sam, a girl said to be the survivor of that murder.
Everything, everyone is converging.
Basically
this is a simple plot: a double murder, revival of interest in the cold case, a
witness who can identify the killers. All done before, but Lennon has delved
into the soul of every character, right down to those who figure only as foils:
Eleanor’s smug agent, Karl’s mistress – an unlikely Mary Magdalene; Irina’s
mentor: the louche guitar man. And the main participants are exquisitely portrayed,
not least the nightmare figure of Joe. Story lines advance plausibly towards
ends which, on reflection, were obvious, but I was so absorbed that I never
made a note and when I did come up for air it was with the conviction that Broken
River is a brilliant work and so far the most perceptive novel of the
year.
Read the first chapter here
