#BookReview ‘A Slow Fire Burning’ by Paula Hawkins

About the book…

‘What is wrong with you?’

Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She’s seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous.

Miriam knows that just because Laura is witnessed leaving the scene of a horrific murder with blood on her clothes, that doesn’t mean she’s a killer. Bitter experience has taught her how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Carla is reeling from the brutal murder of her nephew. She trusts no one: good people are capable of terrible deeds. But how far will she go to find peace? Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill.

Look what you started.

Published on August 31st by Doubleday, ‘A Slow Fire Burning’ is Paula Hawkins third novel, and is available in hardcover and e-book formats.

I loved ‘The Girl On The Train’, so when I saw that Paula Hawkins had a new novel out, my ears pricked up immediately. Having read this week that the word ‘unputdownable’ is a cliché, and does not, in fact exist, I would put it to my learned bookish friends that this novel is the very definition of this allegedly ‘non-existant’ word.

‘Times had changed,people were so intolerant, you couldn’t get away with that sort of thing any longer. One step out of line and you were cancelled.’

Today we went to the hairdressers, the beach with the hound, an abbey and a waterfall.So did ‘A Slow Fire Burning.’

I fell asleep reading it and had the weirdest dreams, but that is neither here nor there, in this novel there is such a high wire of tension and suspense, suspended high in the air and tightrope walking to their fate are Laura, Miriam and Irene, who have been co-opted into this nightmare of a situation whose spark was lit 15 years earlier.

These women are real, raw and so authentic, you could hold your breath and hear theirs, they are damaged women, the ones that people’s gazes pass over, the ones with no social collateral.

A mother without a child.

A broken young woman.

An elderly widow.

Carla is the childless mother, a position that doesn’t even have a word to describe it, her 3 year old son having died in tragic accident, whilst in the care of her sister , Angela.

Laura is the wrecked remains of the child she once was, a car accident survivor whose worst injuries were inflicted after the crash.

Irene lives next door to Angela, until her death, the only friend that she had, who saw her as a real person and not a project after the death of her husband, William.

What draws these women together is the death of Daniel, Carla’s nephew, Angela’s son, Laura’s last one night stand (as she was his).

Laura’s injuries include disinhibition, an awkward gait due to her fractured pelvis and broken legs. The casual cruelty with which Daniel discards her, and projects his disgust at sleeping with her onto him is appalling and tear inducing. She is seen walking away from Daniel’s canal boat home, by neighbouring boat keeper Miriam, who has her own connection to Daniel’s father.

Miriam is the one to find Daniel’s body, and brings herself into the family dynamic of Carla and her husband Theo, a well respected writer whose greatest ‘triumph’ appears to be a wholesale theft of Miriam’s memoirs, under the guise of tutelage.

The one thing in common, apart from trauma, and psychological issues due to the ongoing re-traumatising they experience, is the constant underestimation that each of these women receive from men. They are looked upon with pity, are relegated to bit players in their own stories or, even, have them actually stolen from them.

They are seen as lacking in agency or any kind of power and yet, all of them have a tale to tell, and as the layers of this story are built up through the narrative strands of Carla, Irene, Laura and Miriam (with occasional interjections from Theo and ‘his’ novel) they are simultaneously stripped away to reveal the truth at the heart of their shared experience.

‘Women love crime!’ his agent told him. ‘They enjoy the catharsis of victimhood’.’

They pull apart the controls that society uses to categorise and belittle the women who are seen without virtue-unable to breed, unwilling to breed , or plain and simple, un-fuckable.

You become completely entranced with the spare language used which draws you in, gives space to each woman and a voice which they feel they have had taken away from them, it is almost Grecian in aspect and the cover, which depicts the three faces of the women, made me think of the Graces, subverted. They represent fertility, beauty, joy, all of which are screamingly ‘absent’ from these women and, is used to undermine the way they are treated. For, whilst they are ignored, they are able to support and put their stories back together .

”There it was in black and white.For all the insults they hurled at her,for all the hurtful, unpleasant accusations, for all the dismissal of her claims as entirely without merit,flawed, weak, false, inappropriate, unreasonable, the substance of their argument,boiled down to its essence,could be found in that final sentence: we have all the money and therefore all the power.You have nothing.’

The title is a warning and also a descriptor-the story burns very slowly as does the need for vengeance. This is such a clever, immaculately plotted novel, with taut characterisation and a sparseness of language that leaves the reader to flesh out it’s bones. And I loved it. It could have been way longer in another writer’s hands, and lost the sheer impact that it has, as Laura, Miriam and Carla pull the threads of this narrative together, whilst in a fourth wall breaking , darkly humorous manner, they dissect the mystery novel, the role of women and how casually they are flung aside when viewed as no longer useful.

The first chapter has you on tenterhooks, the final line of it an absolute belter which completely wrong foots you, makes you smile, let’s your guard down and then Paula comes back with a hard left to the jaw that leaves you seeing stars. Her story is just absolutely brilliant, clever, brutal and honest. Above all it is unashamedly honest.

About the author…

Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction.

Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since.

Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has been a global phenomenon, selling 23 million copies worldwide. Published in over forty languages, it has been a No.1 bestseller around the world and was a No.1 box office hit film starring Emily Blunt.

‘Into The Water’, her second stand-alone thriller, has also been a global No.1 bestseller, spending twenty weeks in the Sunday Times hardback fiction Top 10 bestseller list, and six weeks at No.1.

Links-http://paulahawkinsbooks.com/

Twitter @PaulaHWrites @doubledayuk