The last John Boyne I reviewed went in my books that don’t make the cut page. This one, however, was a highlight of the year so far (hey, it’s only February).
A woman arrives on an island off the coast of Ireland with chopped hair and a new name and takes a remote house. It’s a fail-safe start to a yarn. Why is she there, who is she hiding from, what’s happened? She’s been all over the press, we learn. Her husband is in jail, disgraced. Willow, not her real name, engages with the community on the island, enough to keep the gossipers away, hoping they wont discover her past. She takes a young lover, has the occasional meal at the local pub. Thinks about how she ended up in hiding. Boyne leads us along through this excellent woman’s voice, into a past story that slowly unfolds.
As well as hiding from disgrace by association, Willow is also trying to understand the recent death of her daughter – her inexplicable walk into the sea. But is there an explanation? She has another daughter who has distanced herself since her father’s scandal and imprisonment; she’ll fling the occasional clipped text to her mother but Willow has lost the connection they had. She tries to remedy this. There is a reason the girl stays away.
As we learn more about her husband’s crimes, it does seem hard to believe – and many people do not believe – that Willow could have been oblivious to them. The guts of the story focuses on this: how guilty is a person who trusts so much they don’t see? Did Willow really not know, or did she just not want to know and is she, therefore, complicit?
Again, as with many books that cover a horrifying subject, I am nervous of being entertained by inhumanity. In the case of Boyne’s Water the nastiness is all off the page, so we are trying to understand Willow’s response to what her husband has done, rather than be gruesomed (is that a word? It should be…) by the crimes themselves. Being one step removed helps, I think, to take away the crime-as-entertainment feeling and to focus on an indirect party. Interesting. This is a quiet thriller, that goes carefully into a dark place and then out again into the fresh air.
The good news is that it is the first of four interlocking stories. I think I can guess who will carry the story forward and I’m excited to see where it goes.
Cristina Sanders' blog 