#BlogTour ‘A Tidy Ending’ by Joanna Cannon

About the book…

From the bestselling author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie, a delightfully sinister novel about a married woman living a nice, quiet suburban life—but things aren’t always what they seem…

Linda has lived in a quiet neighborhood since fleeing the dark events of her childhood in Wales. Now she sits in her kitchen, wondering if this is all there is: pushing the vacuum around and cooking fish sticks for dinner, a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle she sees in the glossy magazines coming through the mail slot addressed to the previous occupant, Rebecca.

Linda’s husband Terry isn’t perfect—he picks his teeth, tracks dirt through the house, and spends most of his time in front of the TV. But that seems fairly standard—until he starts keeping odd hours at work, at around the same time young women in the town start to go missing.

If only Linda could track down and befriend Rebecca, maybe some of that enviable lifestyle would rub off on her and she wouldn’t have to worry about what Terry is up to. But the grass isn’t always greener and you can’t change who you really are. And some secrets can’t stay buried forever…

Thanks so very much to Anne of Random Things Tours and publishers Borough Press, for my gifted review copy of ‘A Tidy Ending’ by Joanna Canon, out now in all good bookshops!

Well, I am Welsh, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, and to us, applying the word tidy to something can mean more than clean, ordered and everything in its place. It can be used as a descriptor such as ‘Had a good night out?’ ‘Aye, it was right tidy.’ Sometimes expanded to ‘proper tidy’. It can be used when answering a question, or as a response to someone telling you something. The use of just ‘Tidy’ means you have acknowledged what has been said, you have heard the other person’s words and no more needs to be added.

In the respect of this book, it is  clearly a work of genius, wrapped up with the perfect title. Linda has the life she has, and she sees the life she wants, and in the gap between them, she makes this space where the conduit of her dream life, Rebecca Finch, exists.

Rebecca is a previous resident in a street so middle class, so predictable, that the notion of a murderer living there causes outrage. Surely, the residents opine when battle planning how to keep themselves safe, that is more befitting a street on the other side of the estate where they-gasp!-don’t sweep up their chippings?

Flipping between now and then, we have Linda’s narrative voice painting the scene of her domestic life with husband Terry. She is someone who is not really seen, not really listened to, and when these beautiful brochures of another life arrive, in another woman’s name, she sees a chance for a life which she could never get on her own. If she could just find Rebecca, get close to her, then she might have a life rub off on her and live happily ever after. The only thing stopping her is not knowing where Rebecca lives, and her own sneaking suspicions about who could be behind the disappearance, and murder, of several local young women…

She tells us from the start that people who knew her as a child/teen/adult would all struggle to picture her, find an image of her, or say anything about her-she is a cipher of a woman who exists on the far reaches of Terry’s life, he even communicates with her in notes around the house.

Linda and her mother have moved away from Wales, tidying as they went, removing every remnant of their life of the scandal of something that her father has done, which has bought shame on their family. Her mother continues to loom large in her life, constantly reminding her of her failures and lack of self.

Terry does his thing and expects Linda to do hers, she has to rationalise every penny she spends, he doesn’t really see her at all as a living, breathing person, in fact you wonder how on earth they even got to the point of being married, let alone staying married.

A job in a charity shop, which no one sees as real work, rounds out Linda’s life. She watches her soaps, she watches people around her and waits for her life to begin.

Or does she?

Linda tells you right from the start who she is, and the ensuing events which spiral from their moving house to one a bit down the same street strike you as a little unusual, but as Linda herself says, she made it Terry’s idea by planting it in amongst other houses she really didn’t want to move to. So why the same street? Why this life? What is stopping Linda breaking out of this cocoon of waiting for something to happen? Or is it us readers who are also not paying attention as Linda quite clearly lays herself bear, and as the plot progresses to its shattering denouement, you realise that you have been tricked into buying the same flower planted in a nettle patch that Terry has.

Ingenious and clever from beginning to end, this novel is full of the tiny details of a person’s life which makes them so relatable and believable-when Linda mentions hating olives and feeling they are tiny punishments, I totally agreed with her! I find olives bizarre, a food snack I should absolutely love but cannot stand, and find their very existence a personal affront. And this is what Joanna Cannon does so wonderfully, she makes Linda seem so reasonable. The things which happened to her, and moulded her back in Wales, created a person with no real sense of identity. She reminded me of the old Fuzzy Felt games we used to have which present background scenes and she is waiting for someone to move her into position for the action to start.

Shot through with pathos and genuinely moving scenes, I felt Linda a very difficult character to walk away from. The co-existence of narrative threads about  just who has been murdering local girls, the residents being amateur detectives as well as your growing suspicion about just what is going on in this seemingly benign street, simply serve to amplify the chilling nature of the suburban setting.

It reminded me-probably way off base here but let’s give this a try!-of David Nobbs ‘The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin’ via the lens of Fay Weldon’s ‘Praxis’

The subtle layering of characters speaks to Joanna Cannon’s skill of chronicling the things that make us human-foibles, vanity, artifice and expectation-and this makes her story all the more real and grounded for it.

There is only one word left to describe it.

Tidy.

About the author…

Joanna Cannon is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling debut novel ‘The Trouble With Goats And Sheep’, which has sold over 250,000 copies in the UK alone and has been published in 15 countries.

The novel was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, shortlisted for The Bookseller Industry Awards 2017 and won the 2016 BAMB Reader Award. Joanna has been interviewed in The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Times, and Good Housekeeping magazine, and her writing has appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Guardian, amongst others. She has appeared on BBC Breakfast, BBC News Channel’s Meet the Author, interviewed on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5, and is a regular at literary festivals across the country including Edinburgh and Cheltenham.

Joanna left school at fifteen with one O-level and worked her way through many different jobs – barmaid, kennel maid, pizza delivery expert – before returning to school in her thirties and qualifying as a doctor. Her work as a psychiatrist and interest in people on the fringes of society continue to inspire her writing, and Joanna currently volunteers for Arts for Health, an organisation bringing creative arts to NHS staff and patients. Joanna Cannon’s second novel ‘Three Things About Elsie’ was published in January 2018 and explores memory, friendship and old age. She lives in the Peak District with her family and her dog.

Links-https://joannacannon.com/

Twitter @BoroughPress @JoannaCannon @RandomTTours