Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
This is a thriller/murder mystery by the author of The Girl on the Train. It’s similar in it subject matter and that it’s set in England, but it differs in that this one is much more strictly a murder mystery and less a clear-and-present-danger thriller. Also, it doesn’t have an unreliable narrator, which was the linchpin of the tension in The Girl on the Train.
A river that flows through the small town of Beckford is the central motif of this novel. Jules returns to her home town after the mysterious death of her sister Nel, who was working on a book about the town. Nel was obsessed with the river and the drowning deaths that occured there. The prologue to the book has a scene from a young girl who was tried as a witch for the crime of seducing an older married man. The secondary theme of the novel is that men can get away with murdering inconvenient women in this town. The secondary theme was hinted at so strongly that I expected there to be an almost pagan/Wickerman vibe where there was some kind of occult conspiracy. However, with the possible exception of Nellie, who claims to speak with the dead, there aren’t any supernatural elements in this novel.
This novel has so many characters that I had to reference the helpful guide at the beginning that lists who each person is. There aren’t a lot of people to like in this novel. Jules is weak and self-absorbed, Nel was callous and cruel, Lena is defensive and willing to hurt others, Louisa is bent on vengeance. And those are just the women. The men are mostly adulterers, rapists or murderers–sometimes all three! Lena is the only person I thought I might actually like, and I would have preferred if she had been the main character, but I really felt that the author wanted us to focus on Jules, who seemed whiny and hypersensitive. The subtext of this novel is that men are evil and the patriarchy is what protects them, but it felt a little heavy-handed for my taste. I would have liked one really decent man to balance them out. I guess Josh is decent, and Nellie is decent, but they’re minor characters.c
I feel like this is less thriller and more murder mystery, because while there’s a menacing aura, the mystery felt more prominent than the danger. Some of the mysteries were pretty obvious, such as what happened to Sean Townsend’s mother. Some were much less obvious, such as why Katie died. I’m still not entirely sure why Nel stopped swimming or why her bracelet wasn’t on her body when she was found. It was explained but the explanation didn’t make much sense to me. The motivation for the deaths seemed to be “because men are evil and will kill inconvenient women” I read it and nodded like “yeah, okay” but then the next day I realized that it didn’t make much sense to me. It just didn’t feel solid.
Most of the revelations didn’t feel surprising or completely triumphant-chord clear, except the story of Katie. I longed to find out what happened, but when I found out, it felt mostly unsatisfying. Nel’s killer was a twist, but it was a twist that kind of ruined one of the few decent humans in the novel, so the twist ending didn’t please me. Marc could have been a decent person, but then he said a few things that just made him seem unnecessarily nasty, when he had previously been more of a tragic victim. I think the story of Katie could have been more central, because that was truly a compellingly tragic story and might have been a stronger one to wrap a novel around.
My emotional takeaway from this is that if you ask me in a couple of months, I won’t be able to tell you anything about the plot or characters, except maybe Katie’s. The characters felt like real people, but they felt like real people I don’t want to spend time with. And I only sort of get why Nel died, only sort of get why Laura died, only sort of guessed what happened with Mark at the end. Without the “the patriarchy allows men to kill inconvenient women” motif, the murder motivations don’t seem as clear cut. I understand that in real life people kill other people for the dumbest of reasons, but in a murder mystery, I want something a little stronger.
This was pretty well done. The mystery was pretty mysterious, the plotting was pretty tight, the characters were pretty good. But it all just totals up to just pretty good in my estimation.
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