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4.0 out of 5 stars
"You killed my daughter, My daughter is dead because of you", Jan 26 2009
Sad and melancholy, the catalyst for the action in this book is the tragic accident of a school girl, run-down by a police constable. With the light fading fast, the edges of shapes bleeding into a blue gloom and a light rain falling, Jack stares down at the body of Laura actually feeling the body flinch at his words: "She broke the spell. She moved away." One day the thirteen-year-old Laura is giggling over some adolescent secret and leaving towels on the bathroom floor, a worrying age, but now she lies pale, her breath only a faint warm fan of air against her cheek. The coroner finds that Laura had died from punctured lung, coupled with a hemorrhage to the brain when her head had hit the road. He rules that no one was to blame. It was an unavoidable accident, especially after the checks on the car, the post-mortem reports, and the witness statements, especially that of Jack's best mate and Dave. "There is no case and Jack had done nothing wrong."
The ruling, however doesn't help any of the major players that were once Laura's life. Laura's parents Lisa and Derek are lost amidst their grief and suffering. Lisa tries to re-stitch her life and live with the cracks, but the death of Laura has come so suddenly:" you were alive when I went to work and dead when I came home." Even as her ghost always seems to be there, weaving the small threads in the process, Derek collapses and comes to pieces, eaten away by vengeance towards Jack. In a world choked full of grief, most disturbing is the shrine that Derek builds in his back shed, fanatically posting newspapers with photographs of hit and run accidents, cut out into geometric shapes and thumb-tacked to the wall. All of these endless lives destroyed, "shut up like silent witnesses," and crammed into the small space like ghosts.
Jack is constantly haunted by Laura's pale face, the way her lips moved, her eyes stirring under their lids, the blood that curled from her hair. His wife Sam tries to comfort him along with his daughters, Jessica and Bethan, but the memories fall like sudden shadows, and as he sees Laura in Bethan's face. When his boss recommends a leave of absence, and perhaps some psychological counseling, Jack reluctantly agrees, pushing back his feelings and thoughts and the pictures "buttoning it all up under the thick serge of the uniform." A confessional to his therapist Tom Swift and Jack tells him of the early morning waking, the feeling of lead in his stomach, the repetitive thoughts and the constant flashbacks to the accident. And then a vision of Laura with her dad, standing together over the road staring at his house, the ghost of a young girl in a blue uniform looking up at him at the window and then disappearing in an instant, in the blink of an eye.
Sorely conflicted, it is not surprising that Jack and Lisa are drawn to each other, Lisa eventually intruding into Jack's life as both of their marriages begin to fall apart under the strain, Sam into someone else's arms and Derrick eaten away be his revenge and anger. But Lisa and Jack are cocooned by their suffering, the past grief gradually falling away even as the grieving process seems somehow connected to present. Both are propelled into a different kind of future with a strange surge of excitement as the clockwork of their lives is set in motion again. Alternating between both Jay and Lisa's voices, Elizabeth Diamond has written a powerful expose on the nature of grief that seems to literally bleed with revenge and bittersweet hurt. The author digs deep into the interior lives of her two major players, exploring the redemptive power of loss and of love even as time "slips like sand through the sieve," bringing back the past.
Although the mood of this novel is indeed glum, (and maybe filled with a little too much ambient angst) Diamond's mellifluous and relaxed prose is truly stunning as she unfurls a shattering account of the unpredictability of human nature. Trapped in a cosmic drama, both Lisa and Jack discover no matter how much they deny it they are forever knitted to their past. Faced with difficult decisions, Jack rediscovers a lost family connection and Lisa is forced to care for her aging mother, but both ultimately prove their mettle and resiliency, similarly following new paths of love, the burdens of suffering and the ghost of Laura always with them as she quietly sends them on their way. Mike Leonard January 2009
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