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.
We
start with a wedding. No, we start with a person watching guests arrive for a
wedding. Observations are qualified by the nature of the watcher: a second rate
hotel, guests over-dressed, a general air of vulgarity.
The
style changes with another point of view, that of the bride, Lily, a divorced
black woman about to marry Sebastian who is white. Lily’s first husband,
Maxwell, a surgeon, was also white, as is her closest friend, Triss. Maxwell
was Eton educated; Sebastian attended “a boarding school”. The women and
Sebastian are primary school teachers. The differences in education are
highlighted whereas skin colour is subliminal, and sex is never graphic but the
novel steams with race, sex and class. What more can you want?
A small boy, Denny, was the product of Lily’s
first marriage: adored by his father, accepted by Sebastian, indulged by Fran,
the elegant, fragile and fiercely possessive mother of Sebastian. In the wings,
observing play, indeed placing cues, manipulating the characters, is the
watcher, one with some of the attributes of a stalker but not a solitary operator
as is made plain by cryptic insertions in on-line exchanges apparently with
another unidentified figure.
Action
in this novel is a slow burn. Both Lily and Triss teach at the school where
Sebastian is the Head and Denny is a pupil. Tension builds at the end of the
summer term with an inspection looming in addition to the school fete; on the
domestic front there are complications in the person of Fran’s deteriorating
health, while little Denny is having problems both in school and at home – his
two homes, for his father has regular access.
The
deliberately slow pace threatens the reader with the tedium of a dated soap
opera set between school and domesticity: lost children, children found
unharmed, blunders in social etiquette, tantrums, bed-wetting…. But rather too
close to the end the internet chat ratchets blatantly, promising a finale that
can be resolved only by violence.
The
climax arrives and with retrospect everything: from the Watcher at the wedding onwards,
is now seen to have been fraught.
L V Hay plots well and atmospherically. Far
from being a soap this is a sewer, and a worthy shocker.
