This book was chosen for my monthly book club read so I didn’t read a review or its blurb before toddling home with one of my library’s copies. I like to think I had an open mind, though I will admit my one previous exposure to a Shophie Hannah novel wasn’t a terribly positive one.

The opening chapter of THE CARRIER is narrated by Gaby Struthers. She is a 38 year-old business woman who does a lot of travelling for work. On one trip she is prevented from flying out of Dusseldorf airport by bad weather and becomes trapped into looking after one of her fellow passengers, a younger woman called Lauren, whom Gaby thinks of as an ‘unstable tattooed moron’ . Gaby’s sarcastic, superior-sounding internal monologue as she deals with Lauren’s anger at being late and other rants is both funny and cruel but overall did have me thinking I might enjoy the read.

Which is just about the time things fell apart, enjoyment-wise. Lauren has announced that she shouldn’t let a man take the fall for a murder he did not commit but Gaby only finds out many hours later that the man Lauren is talking about is Tim Breary who has confessed to murdering his wife Francine. Though she lives with a different man, Gaby is in love with Tim Breary and vows that she will prove his innocence and thus allow the two of them to live together…finally.

And so begins a tortured tale of thoroughly unlikeable  not terribly believable people, any of whom I would happily have murdered myself if it meant getting to the end of this tome a little bit sooner.

The cast is rounded out by a wealthy married couple called Kerry and Dan who allowed Tim and his wife to move into their mansion two years previously when Francine had a stroke leaving her unable to move or speak and needing 24-hour care. Like Tim they despise Francine for the cruel woman she was pre-stroke, but they adore Tim and want to help him out. Lauren, who we met as the anxious traveller in the book’s opening, was employed as Francine’s carer and she also lives in the mansion along with her husband Jason who is handyman-cum-gardener-cum-thug.

For reasons that are never even remotely clear to me Tim inspires complete worship amongst a mini cult of devotees, i.e. Gaby, Kerry and Dan. As depicted he is an asinine  self-indulgent, bore constantly droning on about his unworthiness. Either he or the author thinks throwing a few lines of poetry into every conversation makes him seem intellectual but honestly it just made him a bit more of a pratt. In short he has all the charisma of wet socks on a winter’s day and I simply did not believe that three adult human beings (even ones with dysfunctional personal histories of their own) would devote themselves to him so fully (Kerry and Dan in particular uproot their own lives completely several times just to be able to serve Tim).

The problem is that this premise underpins the whole story and because I did not buy into it even a little bit the rest of the thing was…well…laughable.

My incredulity only rose a notch or three when the officers of the Spilling police station entered the fray. This completely dysfunctional group of dolts includes Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer who I first met in LITTLE FACE where I thought their fractured relationship completely unworkable. Apparently there have been 6 books in between that book and this one and, unfathomably, the pair are still together. Indeed they’re married now but appear to be as emotionally crippled as they were at the beginning. It’s clear from early events here that a lot more has gone on between these two and amongst their wider group of colleagues and while I don’t know the details of all this sordid nonsense I gather none of it has been pleasant. The upshot of it all is an entire station populated by people who would never actually be employed in a police force but, more to the point, who add absolutely nothing to this story at all aside from word count and tedious sidetracks into infidelity and appalling parenting.

The reason they enter the story at all is because even though Tim has confessed to killing his wife and all the other people involved agree that Tim killed his wife the constabulary diverts its apparently endless resources to investigating the notion that Tim is innocent. There’s a bunch of baffling shenanigans from the boss of the station to ensure that a full investigation takes place and it all seems so far-fetched to me that I have made a mental note that if I ever am accused of a crime I should proclaim my guilt loudly and often as the likeliest way to  make sure the police look for some other bugger to pin it on.

There’s no doubt that Hannah can string a sentence together in a way that is a pleasure to read but that alone doesn’t make a worthwhile reading experience, at least not for me. Her characters are ugly and unrealistic en masse, her plotting tries too hard to be clever and just ends up being tedious and her supposed exploration of human psychology is cruel and borders on the puerile.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2013]
ISBN/ASIN 9780340980736
Length 418 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #8 in the Simon Waterhouse/Spilling Police series

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When Alice Fancourt comes home from her first outing since the birth of her baby Florence a week ago her world falls apart. The baby in the nursery of the house (called ‘The Elms’) she shares with her husband David, his son by his first wife and his mother Vivienne is not, she claims, her own. David is equally adamant that the baby is the same one they brought home from the hospital. When police are called, in the form of DC Simon Waterhouse initially, David is more convincing and suggests that his wife is mistaken or suffering from post natal depression. Nevertheless Simon is smitten with Alice and at least half believes her though he is unsure what he can do to progress an investigation. When his supervisor, Sergeant Charlie Zailer becomes involved she is quickly convinced of David’s point of view and calls a halt to any further investigation. Meanwhile Alice starts living a life of desperation as she is subject to psychological torture by her husband and his mother. And then the trouble starts.

I found this an annoying book to read, almost a DNF actually, and have had a bit of trouble sorting out if it’s the book’s fault or my own. In the end I suspect it’s a mixture.

We’ll start with the fact that I intensely disliked the main female character, Alice Fancourt, from the outset. She is a homeopath (on par with radio talk-back hosts and arms-traders on my personal scale of pond scum professions) and tops that off by being the kind of melodramatic woman that I always want to pour a pot of scalding hot tea over when I meet one in real life. I would, I hope, normally be highly sympathetic to a woman whose baby has been kidnapped and/or one who was being driven silently mad but in this case I couldn’t get past the fact that if she’d had a bit of common sense in the years before the events described in this book the entire sorry episode could have been avoided. But common sense and homeopaths don’t go together.

For all that, Alice is at least vaguely credible (until the end) in a way that most of the other characters are not, or at least not all in one time and place. The book failed the ‘ring of truth’ test for me by converging five of the most emotionally crippled people I’ve ever encountered all together. It’s not only all three of the Fancourts who are barking mad (though they are), but the two main coppers aren’t far off it themselves with their insecurities, sexual obsessions and adolescent behaviour. The pair carried out such a mixture of implausible, illegal and incompetent activities that I struggled to see them as anything approaching individuals who might be employed by any police force in any country in the world. When juxtaposed with the oedipal goings on at ‘The Elms’ it was all too much. I think I could have swallowed one or two such characters but an entire world populated by fruitcakes just made me laugh which kind of spoiled the tension and suspense element I’m guessing the book was aiming for.

I also found the novel’s structure tiresome with short chapters alternating between seeing things from Alice’s point of view in an almost stream-of-consciousness way and then from Simon’s via more traditional storytelling. There seemed to be an unnecessary amount of confusing repetition between the two perspectives, though to be fair this could be my fault as I tended to get carried away in my head with imagining pouring tea over Alice’s head and probably didn’t pay as much attention to some passages as I might have. But even I noticed the big plot twists being telegraphed nice and early. If I hadn’t been so busy being annoyed by Alice and the alarming number of nutters in the one town I think I might also have gotten very cross with the ending which was of the “DA DA…bet you didn’t guess that” ones that make you realise you’ve been dealing with a very unreliable narrator.

There are plenty of people who think this is a great novel and I’m prepared to admit that because the book is the perfect storm of things I hate (gothic melodrama, unreliable narrators, police who belong in high school not the workforce and homeopaths) I have a more jaundiced view of things than usual. I can’t help that but I can at least point to some more favourable reviews for you to provide some balance (see below).

My only question now is whether or not to give the second novel by Hannah (which is also sitting on my TBR shelves) a go or send it to a new home unread. I’ll mull this one over.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Little Face has been reviewed (far more favourably) at A Good Stopping Point and Reading Matters.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 1.5/5 (actually it’s probably a 1 but I did give a few points for Hanna’s creative psychological torture, less is definitely more)
Author website http://www.sophiehannah.com/index.html
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2006]
ISBN 9780340840320
Length 357
Format paperback
Book Series Number #1 in the Simon Waterhouse/Charlie Zailer series
Source I mooched it