Honor Clerk

An ever-present absence

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The development of the book explores what ‘over’ means to the various characters caught up in this tragedy. From the very start Louise’s husband is determined that no one in the family is going to ‘get over’ Miranda’s death, and in a domestic world from which all laughter or pleasure is banned — TV comedies can only be watched in secrecy — it is only a matter of time before life — social, family, marital — is ‘over’ in a far bleaker sense.

This is not exactly new ground for novelists, and because of that a tough furrow to plough. There is a genuine integrity about the way ordinary Louise deals with the extraordinary drama that is visited on her, but there is also a literary price to pay for the kind of human honesty that expresses itself like this:

… my heart beats wildly even now. I don’t want to name Miranda or say she is dead and yet I feel that if I don’t I am denying her. Talking about her, and her death, is too intimate. Why should I share this still excruciatingly painful knowledge with strangers? I don’t want to see their curiosity or their concern or embarrassment. I don’t want to hear their eagerness for details.

And while the plotting is sometimes clunky (does Louise’s friend Pat have to take a holiday cottage in Dunblane?), in the end it is Louise herself who is the problem because, honourable though this book is, one longs for a protagonist with the self-knowledge, or lack of it, to furnish a more textured narrative. It is interesting, and probably psychologically true, to find that it is the resilient Louise who is farthest from recovery, but even this knowledge seems to belong more to a bereavement case-study than to fiction. Only too convincing in its ordinariness as a diary, it never quite takes off as a novel. Why, Louise wonders, can’t Don, for his peace of mind, discover that Miranda has been murdered. In the interest of the narrative I found myself unworthily wondering the same thing.

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