Customer Reviews

The Night Following

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The new novel by Morag Joss may very well be her most powerful book so far. I like her detective series (FUNERAL MUSIC, etc.), and I really like her suspense novels (HALF BROKEN THINGS, etc.), but THE NIGHT FOLLOWING adds a new dimension to her work. Her unnamed heroine, who accidentally kills a woman on a bicycle with her car, is the most vividly realized character Joss has yet created.

If you're like me, you will feel for this sad, untethered woman from the very start. She is a certain age, unfulfilled in her past and her present, she's just learned that her husband is unfaithful, and now--this. But the usual questions raised by her dilemma--Will she be caught? Will she turn herself in?--are not the most pressing ones. Instead, we wonder how she will redeem herself, and what she will do about her victim's helpless, grieving husband. The surprising answers are at the heart of this remarkable novel. I won't soon forget it. Highly recommended.

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

I've read a couple of Morag Joss's books in the past and thought they were really good but in this one she goes into new territory. 'The Night Following' is ambitious and original in the subject matter and the way the story is told and it works brilliantly.
I won't go into the plot here as other reviewers have done that, but the northern saga within the novel (Joss captures perfectly the 'first novel' tone of Ruth's story, clumsy and cliched in places but still fairly readable), and Ruth's husband's tongue-tied letters to her that become increasingly expressive, and the narrator's version of events, including details from her own childhood that chime poignantly and mysteriously with Ruth's saga - all interweave in a mix of distinctive voices that Joss handles expertly.
The last thirty pages or so are a brilliant final act, like a tragedy or an opera where you get the emotional climax and also a sort of intellectual and moral reckoning too, as Joss brings all the layers together and makes her protagonist reflect on her exile from the world.
"There is no natural law in this world that can take such fragmentary and capricious refractions and make of them anything explicable and whole."
Heartbreakingly sad but full of dark humour, this novel is a beautiful, haunting and uplifting account of what it is to make a fatal mistake and strive to make amends, to be tied to your past, and ultimately, to be human. Don't buy it if you like escapist happy endings, unputdownable if you warm to flawed, human characters that make you care and make you think.

The unnamed character is using her husband's car while hers is in the shop. While rummaging in the glove compartment, she finds a condom. Possibly, it is the sadness of discovering her husband's infidelity or the sunlight which momentarily distracts her, but, she hits a bicyclist and kills her. The bike rider, Ruth Mitchell is dead and the driver of the car cannot face the consequences of her deed and drives away.

Later when her husband tells her that the marriage isn't working out and leaves her to live with his lover, she becomes more unhinged and wanting to see how the bereaved man is coping with his wife's loss, she begins following the husband of the bicyclist, Arthur Mitchell.

This psychological novel is drawn out and there are many distractions to the story. The chapters are ended with cryptic notes from Arthur to Ruth. A friend told him that writing in a journal would ease the grief but things like asking his dead wife where the pressure cooker is or bemoaning his inability with the microwave could have been omitted.

In addition, Arthur is cleaning the attic and finds a story Ruth had written and the reader is faced with pages and pages of this story which was set in 1932 and have little to do with the current story.

The woman who killed Arthur's wife continues to place herself in his life so much so that she makes Arthur think that Ruth, in fact, had returned.

This is rather bizarre and defies believablity.
The novel was nominated for an Edgar Award for the best novel of the year and how the judges picked this and missed Michael Koryta's "Envy the Night" is a mystery in itself.

What are our lives but the stories that we weave in order for us to construct some semblance of meaning, not so much from the reality of the world we inhabit, as from the remembrances of the things that we have glimpsed in dream or otherwise imagined? How much of other people's stories do we absorb and make our own, binding them into our own life-threads through our sudden and everyday encounters? How easily -- casually almost -- can our life-story be altered or turned around by those encounters? Or by events that are thrust upon us by fate? Are the ghosts that surround us real, or do we simply make them as we need them to be? Can we turn back time and take over the life-story of another if we feel the need badly enough?

Morag Joss' dark novel of deception, betrayal, guilt, loss, atonement and redemption is elegantly written and masterfully constructed. And for all that the events she unfurls within this book become ever more unlikely as it progresses, the story-telling is so engaging that any disbelief one might have simply falls away, as one is drawn ever deeper into her tale, in the hope that redemption and reparation will triumph in the end.

Mixing pathos, poignancy and humour in a sharply observed and deftly painted picture of human relationships, "The Night Following" weaves a fabulous tale of interlocking and devastatingly interacting life-stories. These intertwine and affect each other at several narrative levels and in altogether unexpected ways in a stunningly brilliant story that pushes at the boundaries of psychological thriller and suspense novel but is so much more than either. Hauntingly beautiful in places but never less than dark throughout, this book is a masterpiece of invention and extremely cleverly built and executed. Reading it is like peeling the layers of an onion and not just because it has you reaching for the tissues time and time again! Wonderful stuff!

This book by Morag Joss is a very unusual book, weird even but the plot can catch you and drag you along through the book. It is interesting how she weaves three different plot lines through the book. It was interesting.

J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"

When I started this book, I knew I would be drawn into it. I was, the further I got, and up until the last few chapters I would have considered this a five-star. As it neared almost the very end, the story took on a completely different tone. The rest of this review contains spoilers...

****SPOILERS****

I think it may have been the very worst ending I've ever read in a book. I thought the way it ended was absolutely depressing, to say the least. For one thing, so many ends were left untied, such as how Ruth knew the life story of the woman who killed her. Ruth's chapters of her unfinished novel "The Cold and the Beauty and the Dark" are interlaced within the main story, and at the end of "The Night Following" we are left disappointed to say the least as to how on earth Ruth knew the story, how or if she was somehow connected to the family of the woman who killed her, etc. How could such an important piece of the plot be left to just hang? I thought the story took a downright weird and disturbing turn, and the rambling toward the very end got to be so strange none of it was even making any sense and instead was turning into a story I felt I hadn't even read. Aside from this, I wish the author (Morag Joss) would have given the protagonist (the one responsible for Ruth's accidental death) a name. Why did she bother to give her husband (Jeremy) a name, when he barely has any part in the book, but not the guilty woman? Why not just leave them both unnamed if you aren't going to bother? I think at the end we should have found out her name and her true identity. At the end, we are given the feeling that she has turned into a drifter. I take it that she is supposed to probably just leave herself for dead, or that she will somehow purposely cause her own death. Why couldn't this story have had a much happier ending? Had I been the author and I would have given this story a far more reasonable climax, having the woman come forward with her guilt and get herself and Arthur the help they so obviously needed.
I give this story one star, instead of the five it would have deserved had it not been for the dreadful way it turned out.

Although there were sections I must admit I skimmed through (Ruth's story), the book held my attention throughout. Joss is one of my favorite authors, and her story was compelling, and so emotional, especially the letters written by Arthur, Ruth's husband. She paints a compelling character study of the protagonist as well here. Highly recommended.

Atonement. Expiation. In the broken sunlight of an afternoon's carelessness, born of a shocking discovery and the end of a marriage, a woman lies lifeless in the road, her bicycle wheels spinning slowly to a stop. The driver, a doctor's wife who has chosen a leafy country road to return from a shopping excursion, cannot assimilate what has just happened. As she reaches for her cell phone, clutching a sheaf of the victim's papers swirling in a sudden gust, she changes her mind, throwing herself impulsively behind the wheel, leaving her victim alone, twittering birds anxiously hovering near the corpse. The driver is assaulted by mixed emotions: the irrefutable evidence of her husband's infidelity; the broken eggs and bleeding raspberries spilled on the plush upholstery of his bright yellow Saab convertible; the cracked windshield where Ruth Mitchell's sixty-one year old body slammed into the Saab.

Safely inside her locked garage, the woman is frantic, smashing the car in helpless rage, her marriage in shambles, her life forever altered from the moment she struck the innocent bicycler. A shocked husband returns home to face a wife who cannot begin to articulate the events of the day, a day which will tumble into others, loosely taking form, an accidental intent to make impossible restitution: "Another day had got people in its crass and ruthless grip and was propelling them through the hours, using them up with things that didn't matter." From this stunning beginning, in prose that captures the essence of each shattering moment, the inevitable consequences of loss, a ticking time bomb of guilt and profound remorse, the world continues, oblivious to the momentousness of what has happened. The undefined, shadowy guilt subtly undermines the protagonist's every attempt to recapture a sense of normalcy. Infidelity is laughable, incongruous in the face of the greater issue, a lonely widower left to sort through the detritus of years of marriage.

Not content to dwell on this one unforeseen happening, the author delves further into her characters via Ruth Mitchell's novel, "The Cold and the Beauty and the Dark", haunting letters a grief-stricken Arthur pens to his dead wife as he struggles to restructure a once orderly, well-cared for existence. The doctor's wife- who remains nameless- hovers at the edges, watching, her own delusions tainting her perceptions of Arthur's continuing anguish as he languishes without his wife's nurturing presence. There are stories within stories, unexpected connections that spread like the branches of trees, rooting the characters to a circular theme. The language of loss, of expiation and of yearning to erase the fateful event imbue this novel with melancholy beauty, the inexorable passage of time and the indifferent demands of fate. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

On the day she discovered her husband's infidelity, the woman was driving home from the supermarket in the rain. She hit a woman traveling on bike instantly killing her. Thus begins a complex tale. The novel alternates between letters written by the husband of the victim to his dead wife, chapters of the victim's novel, and the reactions of the motorist.

It is a complex concept, and wearing on the reader. The husband, Arthur Mitchell, shows an inability to cope without his wife, Ruth, and slowly deteriorates. The motorist kicks her husband out, and then devotes herself to secretly assisting Arthur, by spending nights at his home cleaning up, cooking and doing other chores by way of atonement.

Eventually, Arthur comes to believe that his dead wife somehow has returned to care for him, not realizing the very person responsible for her death is right there. It is a complicated and even perverse novel. And, I venture to say, probably will appeal to a restricted and limited audience, no matter how well-written it is. That said, and to that extent, it is recommended.

This is the author's sixth novel. She was a 2003 winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award.