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.
Episodic, with one exception: the extended revelation near the end, but neither the pruned chapters nor the denouement is totally revealing; Oates is as transparent as spring water but mischievous and secretive, at the same time carrying her readers along with wicked hints of irony rendered so neatly you wonder if it’s all in the mind – your mind.
Pursuit is not supernatural as one reviewer has it but deeply psychological and the more disturbing for that. The spectral world is (reputedly) insubstantial, but evil is reality. (Oates’ style, including her delight in parenthesis, is infectious.)
One’s apprehension starts in Intensive Care with a young man at the bedside of his bride asking her why she stepped in front of a bus. This is followed by the persistent nightmare Abby (Gabriella) had in childhood, that returned on her wedding eve and is assumed to be recurring now as she lies in a coma. It refers to the disappearance of her parents when she was five, and her (later) discovery of bones (the Daddy skull and the Mummy skull) on the bank of a creek on the family farm in upstate New York.
Action swings back and forth through time and space with apparent abandon but, in fact, carefully plotted. From Abby’s nightmare we switch to her riding downtown on a bus the morning after her wedding: ecstatically happy (the reader noting with a frisson that her new husband is a devout Christian) – fingering her wedding band, and timidly shrinking from the (slightly) flirtatious advances of the stranger beside her. She gets off the bus before her stop and steps in front of the next one.
Why? What was she thinking? What happened last night? Why is she alone on a bus on this joyful morning? Where is the husband? Actually those last are the easy questions; the husband is attending classes at his Med School, she’s going to work (teaching); neither has any money, they’ll honeymoon later (a short weekend). It’s the other questions that are hard, the answers excruciating and slowly revealed in flashbacks and from different points of view: from Abby herself, from her mother, her father, and, pulling it all together, exposing souls but passing no judgement: Oates, a scholarly and perceptive author with a very personal laidback style that grips like a pit bull. Read it again to check out the intricate construction. Viewed objectively you may cope better with the horror.
