“On a Tuesday in
May, in her thirty-seventh year, Rachel shot her husband dead.”
This is the line that begins the brief prologue to Since We Fell, a
tour de force from Dennis Lehane which reminds is above all about
what a talented writer he is. Like Mystic River, it is a novel about
emotions. But what makes it so remarkable is the way it is told, in
three sections, each with its own focus and its own style, the latter
serving to emphasize the former.
The first, titled
'Rachel In The Mirror', could easily stand alone as a novella in a
mainstream literary magazine. It covers the story of Rachel Childs,
raised alone by her psychology-professor mother who authored a
best-selling self-help book called The Staircase, which referred to
the stages any relationship goes through, and which Elizabeth tells
Rachel was a piece of 'emotionally adolescent snake-oil'. She barely
remembers her father, who left the family when she was young, but she
recalls her mother's threat as he walked away: “If you leave I will
expunge you.” Her mother gave Rachel little information about her
father, but she becomes determined to track him down, and after
Elizabeth's death in a car crash, that determination becomes an
obsession. The story of her quest is interwoven with her experience
as a successful TV reporter in Boston, married to a successful
producer, and on the verge of network stardom. She is sent to cover
an earthquake in Haiti, and in the chaos that follows the disaster,
she finds it impossible to 'report' the positive, and her career and
marriage both crash. Like the quest for her father, it's a tale of
disappointment, and a revelation about the nature of life and life's
pain. It is a perfectly done, self-contained story, but one that
needs to be remembered as the tale unfolds. It also contains one of
Lehane's aphoristic moments, like the Irish whiskey scene in The
Drop, when a character explains “the only people who ask questions
like 'did he want to be something besides a bartender?' are people
who can become whoever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”
When the second
section, 'Brian', opens, Rachel bumps into the private detective she
had originally hired in Western Massachusetts to search for her
father at the faculties of universities in the area. Brian is now
back in charge of his family's lumber business in Canada, and he is
the stable figure Rachel needs, as she's now suffering from an
inability to face the world. But all, as they say, is not what it
seems, and Brian is living a double life, built on a structure of lies. Were this the opening of the novel a shrewd marketing type
might have called it The Girl On The Staircase, because it fits into
that modern genre of woman battling to find the truth behind an
ominous menace. Lehane is again pitch-perfect: his writing builds
that menace slowly, and it concludes with the scene that opened the
prologue.
The third section
deals with the aftermath of the shooting, as Rachel tries to piece
together the mysteries that have gone before. It's titled 'Rachel In
The World', which reflects the change as she is forced to act. And
it's written in the kind of action prose we've seen from Lehane in
his last few novels, quick moving, event-driven, and pushing toward a
conclusion that at first glance, while legitimate and consistent,
might strike some as being somewhat mechanical. Until one stops to
think about what has gone before and what has been said to Rachel and
thought by Rachel, and presented to Rachel. And here is where this
brilliant novel transcends the concept of psychological thriller, or to be more accurate, it tells us where the roots of the psychology that creates the situation for such thrillers lies, and what it means.
Because what it is about, recall, is the nature of living, and how we
cope with its pain. And what we do, Lehane is telling us, is play
roles, play con games, by which we fool others and ourselves about
what we are inside. From her mother's book and tales to the hitman playing injured
father, from Rachel indoors or inside herself to Rachel out in the
world as wife or as avenger, we learn to accept the darkness outside,
the dirt beneath. Because, as we learn, we do not own life, we rent
it.
Since We Fell by
Dennis Lehane
Little, Brown £18.99
ISBN 9781408708330
published on 16 May
This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.Crimetime.co.uk)
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