In my quest for the best of current thrillers ahead of writing the Joan of Arc book, I found ‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn. It was getting stellar reviews and I thought it was worth a try.
So I started it at 8 pm last night. Charlotte Grey was on the television, the dog and the cat were playing chase round the living room… I wasn’t really concentrating. I got about a third of the way through this and decided it wasn’t worth reading: Too predictable, too horribly middle-american, to preppy-nice, clean-cut… yurg. It seemed, also, to have a rather obvious plot: man’s wife goes missing on the morning of their 5th wedding anniversary and, as we progress through her past diaries of their early years and his first person account of her mysterious vanishing, we come to trust him less and less. ‘Unreliable narrator.’ Yawn.
So I skipped a few pages and plugged on through and somewhere, about 10 o’clock, it became interesting. Really interesting. Clever, well constructed, unpredictable kind of interesting. Nothing was as it seemed and the characters were becoming more rounded by the page. I won’t tell you the detail: you need to read it to find out, but suffice to say I finished it at 1:15 am with the kind of ‘ohhhhhh, fuck!’ feeling that it’s all just so horribly, inescapably ghastly, but terrifyingly real.
Three stars because I came within an inch of putting it down and if I’d had anything more interesting to read, I’d never have persevered, but if the first half is a one-star dull-fest, the latter half is easily worth 5 stars. Easy to see why the author has won all kinds of awards and this only her third book.
