The Drowning People [Hardcover]

Richard Mason (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

It is a cold afternoon in winter. An old man sits in a room high above the sea, watching the sun set. It is twenty-four hours since the death of his wife at Seton Castle, the home they had shared for more than forty years. And as it grows dark, he tries to make sense of a life only recently understood; and to explain how he, by no means a violent man, has come to kill in cold blood...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"My wife of more than forty-five years shot herself yesterday afternoon. At least that is what the police assume, and I am playing the part of grieving widower with enthusiasm and success... It was I who killed her." Thus begins the much-hyped first novel by 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate Richard Mason. Your typical murder mystery The Drowning People is not, for we are given the identity of the killer--the who--immediately. The puzzle in this introspective novel is why--why did 70-year-old James Farrell murder his aristocratic wife, Sarah? The answer lies nearly 50 years into the past as the book ranges from Prague to London, from France to a remote castle in Cornwall. At its core is an intoxicating love affair between 22-year-old James, a talented violinist and hopeless romantic, and Ella Harewood, an American heiress to an English title, trapped by her heritage and destiny. A beautifully written exploration of self-absorbed first love and its tragic consequences, The Drowning People soars beyond the highest of expectations placed upon it. --Shannon Bingham, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

The startling opening sentence (My wife of more than 45 years shot herself yesterday afternoon) and the compelling voice of narrator James Farrell draw the reader into the emotional vortex of this accomplished debut novel by a 20-year-old British writer. We learn immediately that his long marriage to Sarah Harcourt was not an affair of the heart for James. His love for Sarahs insecure, fragile cousin, Emma, is the substance of the flashback narrative, which deftly evokes the obsessive passion of first love, meanwhile alluding heavily to sin and guilt. When James meets Ella Harcourt he is about to graduate from Oxford, and to begin serious study of the violin. English-born but raised in America, Ella is heiress to the family seat, Seton Castle, which Sarah patently covets. Moreover, Ella has stolen the man Sarah loves, an eminently acceptable member of the English upper class, and is about to announce their engagement. Recognizing that they are meant for each other, Ella and James conspire to break the engagement, meanwhile meeting secretly and enjoying supreme happiness. They separate for a time when James goes to Prague with his generous and devoted friend Eric de Vaurigard, but Ellas needy nature requires proof of Jamess love, and his actions lead to betrayal and death. Mason is remarkably assured for a young writer, but he has not aimed his sights very high. This is essentially a romantic novel in the Du Maurier tradition, reproducing the portentous, elegiac tone and slowly revealed secrets of this seductive genre. Though Mason supplies clever plot twists, the suspense element is clothed in psychological trendiness: the source of Jamess dilemma is the plot device of too much fiction of late. And though Jamess ruminations on the emotional repression of the British privileged classes alert the reader to his crucial lack of maturity, his incessantly repeated claims of navet and innocence wear thin. Yet there is a large audience for a suspenseful, romantic story like this one, especially when it is told in literate and polished prose. Moreover, the photogenic Mason (and his Oxford accent) should make quite a hit on the talk shows. Major ad/promo; rights sold in Germany, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France, Holland, Israel, Finland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Norway and Japan; Literary Guild alternate; Time Warner audio; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; 1St Edition edition (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446525243
• ISBN-13: 978-0446525244
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (171 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #466,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pretentious Drivel!, August 12, 2000

By 

[e-mail] "Marty" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Drowning People (Hardcover)

OK, let's give Mr. Mason credit for a damn good 2-page opening. It's the remaining 300 pages I have trouble with. First of all, the author is intellectually lazy. He wanted his protagonist to reminesce over the past 50 years but couldn't be bothered doing research on life in 1950 (don't forget that advance they were dangling in front of him), so he plops him down in 2040 without even a by-your-leave. After all, then he'd have to show a little creativity about life in the future. I don't know why so many reviewers said they couldn't believe the book was written by an 18 year old. It could ONLY have been written by an 18 year old! Only kids that age are involved in so much "philosophical", narcissistic, we're-different-from-the-rest-of-the-planet, self-absorbed navel-gazing. Blah, blah, blah, blah.....And this is where Mr. Mason shows his mediocrity as a writer. He continually describes what his characters are thinking, feeling, etc., but he doesn't have the ability to let them demonstrate his descriptions though their own words and actions. And then there's the story. Did you really believe Sarah's pathological hatred of Ella is based on Ella's snagging the most forgettable character in all literature (She should have thanked her!) Do you have any clue why James marred Sarah? And best of all--this was really a thigh-slapper--Did you really buy James' agreeing to have sex with his best male friend in order to prove to his fiancee that he wasn't homosexual? How many men are getting on that line! But,most sadly of all, I could have forgiven all of the above had there been a single word of wit or charm or grace. Daphne du Maurier indeed!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good intentions, but no cigar, March 14, 2005

By 

Steven Reynolds (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Drowning People (Mass Market Paperback)

The best thing about Richard Mason's debut novel is its deeply macabre plot about upper-class family madness, murderous revenge, and the ruthless insensitivity of young people in love. Taken on its own, it's quite good fun in a gothic, BBC-drama kind of way, and would make a decent movie. You'll work out what's happened well before the final pages, but that doesn't actually spoil things at all - it's entertaining to watch it all unfold like a car accident in slow-motion, and most readers will be happily immersed in it. Mason clearly has a talent for conceiving bizarre revenge plots (as his second and weaker novel, "Us", confirms - not available in the USA, but you can get it from Amazon UK). What he's not so good at (yet) is the actual writing. In "The Drowning People", he seems to have made the fundamental error of wanting us to take the plot seriously; or, rather, choosing such a plot as the basis for a novel which obviously yearns to say something serious about guilt, the dangerous power of first love, and the life-long consequences of youthful selfishness. But it's too convoluted, too B-movie, and too concerned with its own construction to be very effective in that task. The result is that the real "content" of the novel - the ideas about guilt and responsibility - don't emerge from the events. Rather, they're imposed on them. They're constantly re-stated by a narrator who pontificates about Life and all that he has learned from it, which sadly seems to be little more than a raft of platitudes and cliches, delivered in a pompous, finely-cadenced, T.S. Eliotesque tone that irritates more than it convinces. But what else would you expect from an 18-year-old writer with no experience of the kind of life-long perspective he's affecting? It's a classic example of a nervous young author striving to make his point clear and impressive via narrative commentary because he knows it doesn't flow from the action - action which, once again nervously, he's made too flashy, too plot-heavy, to be emotionally engaging in the way it needs to be. If Mason had chosen just one part of this elaborate story - the James-Eric-Ella love triangle, for example, with its hideous "proof of love" pact - and gone deep rather than long, it might have worked. James' pain would have been far more interesting, far more tangible, if he'd really described how it actually felt to a confused 22-year-old rather than just relating it to abstract morality. The familiar lovers'-bargain-with-disastrous-consequences device used in the James-Eric-Ella vignette has long been a powerfully effective one, as in "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" and "Wings of the Dove", and could have been given a nice contemporary airing here exploring issues of class, masculinity, sexuality and female power. Alternatively, Mason might have taken Sarah's point of view - for she's actually a much more interesting character than narrator James. But he didn't make these choices. So, in the end, the novel doesn't work beyond the level of "trashy thriller with literary pretensions", neither fish nor fowl, etc.

To observe the difference between this and really good writing, you need only pick up one other novel, published in the same year, which is also about the memory of a juvenile crime and its life-long ramifications: I'm talking about Ian McEwan's "Atonement". It has everything Mason's novel lacks: a simple but compelling plot, credible characters, a subtle use of language, a convincing depiction of several historical periods, a wonderful sense of the passage of time, and a quiet but entirely justified confidence in its own hidden complexities. It's also incredibly moving in a way Mason's novel strives to be but never comes close to achieving. Moreover, the actual telling of the story is not simply an excuse to revel in "the wealth of shameful detail" (p.196), as it sometimes seems to be in Mason's novel despite the narrator's protestations to the contrary. For McEwan, the telling is a vital act emerging from the central character's nature; an imaginative transformation, that is itself a part of the story, and immovably locked into the novel's theme. Read them back to back and you'll see what I mean.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Let the author try again - in 20 years or so, February 5, 2002

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Drowning People (Mass Market Paperback)

Mason is being touted as some kind of adolescent prodigy, but the book simply doesn't deliver. It is an extremely convoluted and unlikely story, overstuffed with cities, castles and too obviously 'interesting' rich people. Characterisation hardly evolves beyond caricature, which is fatal especially for the main figures, James and Ella. Ella emerges as some kind of histrionic Gorgon, fickle and highly unlikeable, which makes it hard to see why James would fall in love with her in the first place, let alone have his every emotion and action dictated by her (fancy attempting to have sex with your best male friend only to prove to your girl, who suspects you of being gay, that it doesn't work for you. There's a bit of twisted psychology for you if ever there was!) This uncritical slavery doesn't inspire much sympathy for his character either. Mason doesn't bother to explain all this, probably being too busy keeping the storyline together. Yet the love of James for Ella is the pivotal element, without an understanding of which the plot simply falls apart.Mason's inexperience, not as much as a writer but simply in life, shines through on every page. He seems selfconscious about this, judging by all the times he lets his (elderly) narrator muse on the inexperience and silliness of youth. All this is not too convincing. Though not per se badly written, there are some irritating mannerisms, not least the far too frequent use of the tag 'you see', probably meant to create the intimate feel of the narrator directly addressing us. But in a novel where there is really so very little to be seen (and what there is, you will have seen at least 20 pages before the narrator comes out with it) this did strike me as somewhat ridiculous: like somebody telling you the clue (ta-taaa) to a joke that has fallen flat long before. So forget about this book. Too many words to describe too little, too many aspirations and too little realisation of them.