THE NIGHT FOLLOWING
Morag Joss
Delta
Psychological Thriller
Hardcover: 9780385341189
Paperback: 9780385341196

There’s something cozy about the traditional mystery. A body is found somewhere in Chapter 1, perhaps Lord Muckety-Muck in the library of his Very Stately Home, and by Chapter 10 we can expect an amateur detective --- with a deerstalker, aristocratic title, or at the very least a Belgian accent --- to have delivered the culprit to us. Blood has been spilled and anguish has been felt, but it’s all kept within tidy bounds.

I love books of that kind --- I was practically weaned on them --- but there are also suspense novels that are deeper and more disturbing, and I enjoy those as well. A mystery, after all, is potentially a morality play; it deals with matters of life and death, right and wrong, deceit and violence, guilt and penance. In that sense, great literature --- HAMLET, ATONEMENT (the book, not the movie!), and, of course, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT --- may skirt the edges of this genre, and a really good thriller can aspire to being a serious novel.

British writer Morag Joss pulled this off brilliantly in the gothic HALF BROKEN THINGS (winner of the 2003 Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award); her divine Sara Selkirk series, though more in the cozy category, is equally top-drawer. In PUCCINI’S GHOSTS, trying too hard for gritty realism, I think she wound up with an unpleasant and ultimately unsatisfying book. But her newest, THE NIGHT FOLLOWING, straddles the line between “regular” fiction and mystery more successfully.

In fact, to begin with, it feels more like an experimental, willfully disorienting modern novel than a tale of suspense: a nameless narrator, a lot of philosophizing about contingency and displacement (an excess of first-person musings is the book’s only real fault), a novel-within-a-novel, a series of cryptic letters. But please do persist, because around 90 pages in, the facts start to fall decisively into place (and I must share some of them, even at the risk of being a spoiler, or this review won’t make sense).

The narrator --- a woman of middle age whose hobby is painting, whose childhood was grim, and who has settled for a numb, passionless marriage to an anesthesiologist --- discovers that her husband is having an affair. Not entirely unhappy to shrug off her marital illusions, but also shocked and distracted, she runs into a woman on a bicycle and kills her. She retreats, suffused by guilt, and begins to haunt the house of the widower, Arthur, as if by watching over him she can expiate her crime. Arthur, meanwhile, is writing letters to Ruth, his dead wife (a therapeutic exercise suggested by a grief counselor); fending off officiously helpful neighbors; and finding chapters from Ruth’s unpublished book and poems around the house. The novel, THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK, is a strongly feminist account, set in the 1930s, of a working-class woman trapped in marriage and motherhood, and it parallels the lives of both protagonist and victim in uncanny ways.

THE NIGHT FOLLOWING is implicitly a portrait of two rather complacent marriages --- one (the narrator’s) more or less unhappy; the other (Arthur and Ruth’s) apparently contented. As Arthur’s letters become longer and more detailed, however, we see that while he depended on his wife for all things practical and emotional, she had an inner life apart from him. She hadn’t even shown him the novel. Arthur and the narrator are also twinned in the way they mourn --- both sleep during the day and go about at night, as if the darkness protects them from their chaotic inner worlds and the invasive sympathy of others. “Everything gets damped down in the dark,” Arthur writes to Ruth. “Makes it easier to cope. In the dark it’s not so obvious you’re not here. I can imagine that you are and I just can’t see you.” And the narrator, echoing him: “It was obvious that daylight made [Arthur] crazy, too, and at the core of our night companionship was a silent agreement that all we were doing was taking sensible steps to avoid it.”

To be blind and invisible in this way is another of the book’s big themes. The narrator’s grandmother was blind, and so is the heroine of Ruth’s novel; thus, they are easy to deceive but also capable of transcendent insights. And of course there is the figurative blindness of the narrator, who doesn’t “see” until betrayal and sudden death force her to, that her marriage has no heart and her life has no point. She was going grocery shopping in her husband’s car when she looked in the glove compartment and found a condom; Ruth was cycling along and in the next moment “she became carrion,” a body in the road stalked by hungry crows. Any attempt to control our fate with a perfect home, glossy car or civilized marriage is fruitless.

THE NIGHT FOLLOWING, with its triple point of view (I include Ruth’s, via her novel), has a complexity of vision that is sometimes extraordinarily effective. But it is also a lot to handle. The writing is certainly up to it. Joss’s prose is subtle, beautiful, smart and sometimes funny and touching. Arthur’s letters, in a totally different voice from the narrator’s, are small masterpieces; in a more poetic vein, the author is very good at evoking the way things slow down and details grow sharper when catastrophe strikes (blossoming, windswept trees; bright sky; the victim’s blue hat and broken body). Her ability to suggest the macabre dimension of everyday objects and events is in the tradition of the best, earliest works of Ruth Rendell; in some respects this novel also reminds me of Daphne Du Maurier’s more romantic REBECCA. But I’m not so sure that it wouldn’t have been better without the additional layer of Ruth’s book. And the ending, from which I expected a revelation, some extra narrative punch, was a bit of a letdown.

But these are minor objections. THE NIGHT FOLLOWING is a fascinating book that stretches the boundaries of the pro forma suspense novel and takes us into the murky realms of guilt and grief. If you like your mysteries dark, try it.

    --- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

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