Perspective Recommends

THRILLER OF THE MONTH

In Deep Water
By Christobel Kent
(304pp, Little, Brown, £20.99, hb)
Reviewed by SJ Watson

Christobel Kent, already the author of an acclaimed series of mysteries set in Florence, has been quietly carving out another niche for herself in recent years, writing smart, noir-ish psychological thrillers that are both beautifully composed and packed with tension. So I was looking forward to getting my hands on In Deep Water, and it did not disappoint. 

Sukie is twenty-something and inexperienced. Browbeaten by her mother and tired of being described as timid, she decides almost on a whim to push beyond the bounds of her comfort zone by accepting the offer of a trip to a Greek Island with Jake, an older man she’s barely begun dating. But at the airport they’re spotted by Heather, who understands immediately that the younger woman is in danger and decides to follow them. For Heather has history of her own with Jake and, as well as saving Sukie, this might be her opportunity for revenge.

What follows is a gripping cat-and-mouse thriller that, cliché though it is to say, will keep you turning the pages well into the early hours. More than that, it’s a beautifully constructed novel. Kent tightens the screws with chapters from both Sukie’s and Heather’s perspectives, but we also hear from those back in the UK, as they realise the dangers their loved ones have rushed into, searching desperately for news. The gorgeous setting helps, but what really elevates the novel is the quality of Kent’s writing. Her prose is sparing and unsentimental, but richly evocative, and the plot is perfectly paced. She cleverly resists the temptation to throw in any of the increasingly improbable twists that have begun to plague novels of this genre, and the book is no less compelling for it. She has also created a truly despicable, yet entirely believable, antagonist (no mean feat) and the ending satisfyingly blends surprise and inevitability. Kent even manages to raise a wry smile with the very last line.

To say this novel makes a perfect summer beach read is not to damn it with faint praise. It’s a beautifully taut, gorgeously conceived thriller. Pack it in your suitcase or enjoy it at home with a cup of tea. Either way, it’s not to be missed. 

S J Watson is the award winning author of the bestselling psychological thrillers Before I Go To Sleep, Second Life and Final Cut. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

Mother’s Boy
By Patrick Gale
(416pp, Headline, £20, hb)
Reviewed by Clare Conville

Mother’s Boy is a fictional account of the great poet Charles Causley (1917-2003), perhaps best known for the poem “Eden Rock”, a striking admission of his own impending mortality. Deceptively simple in structure and language, his poems have a clarity and lightness that belies their profundity. He wrote for both adults and children, never differentiating between the two.

A lifelong inhabitant of Launceston, Causley’s poetry continues to be honoured in Cornwall, but his work has fallen out of favour in recent years. Backed with impeccable research, fellow Cornishman Patrick Gale has imagined his life for the reader, from the daily round of existence in a small provincial town to being trapped on the deck of a warship, under terrifying attack in the seething Atlantic Sea.

Gale is the most English of writers, showing acute insight into social codes and a clear-eyed exploration of class and sexuality, such as the unhappy encounters between the fictional Charles and his on-off lover, the loathsome Bucknall. His empathetic feel for the warp and weft of complex, often painful relationships (including his complex symbiosis with his mother, Laura), keeps the reader on their moral mettle and their nose to the very last page. Nor does he flinch from empirical themes, whether it is the casual sexism, misogyny, and snobbery that a working-class woman might experience in the early half of the twentieth century, or the structural racism rife in the American military, where black and white soldiers are segregated into different camps outside Launceston as well as at local pubs and dances.   

Both Causley’s parents were born in the workhouse and went “into service”, his father survived World War I but came home with a mortal case of TB. Brought up single-handedly by his indefatigable mother, Charlie became an owlish child with a musical soul and an incredible ear for the poetry of everyday language.

The novel moves seamlessly between Laura and Charles, the twin consciousnesses of the novel, and Laura’s devotion to her son forms the emotional backbone of the story. While Charles is the creative, uncertain, sometimes unhappy force in the story, Laura finds fulfilment through work and friends. It’s not just Charles who’s dependent on her kindness and certainty – others, too, are drawn to her generosity of spirit, whether its Amos the black soldier or Helmut the refugee, who brings her the surprising gift of twins Terry and Jerry. These relationships see her through the most difficult times.

Clever Charles, on the other hand, is bullied at school and struggles to make friends, his sexuality adding to his sense of difference. We are led through a series of encounters, like pearls on a string, with school friends such as Joe Luke and Ginger; a homo-erotically charged moment at a seaside lido is pivotal in Charles’ journey to self-awareness.

Charles joins the navy in World War II, enduring a traumatic time at sea, both physically and mentally. After becoming a “coder”, he finds recovery and creativity back in Launceston as a teacher and poet. But the emotional crux of the novel relies on Charles’ relationship with Cushty, a fellow seaman, friend and lover – who Causley admitted had inspired his astonishing poem, “Angel Hill”. This is where the novel takes flight before Charles is crushed by events, societal expectations and self-denial. 

I like to think of Patrick Gale writing in his own “bright glass cabin” where, as Causley describes it in ‘The Seasons of North Cornwall’:

“All Cornwall thunders at my door,
And the white ships of winter lie,
In the sea-roads of the moor.”

And to misquote from the novel, how grateful we should be that he has handed us this vivid and powerful version of Causley’s life and story.

Every Family Has a Story
By Julia Samuel
(308pp, Penguin Life, £14.99, hb)
Reviewed by Belinda Bamber

If there’s something undeniably voyeuristic in reading about other people’s therapy, it can also prove enlightening – almost as good as having a session yourself.

Julia Samuel is a high-profile psychotherapist who was close friends with Princess Diana and is rumoured to have offered a shoulder to Meghan Markle when she felt suicidal during pregnancy. But red-top gossip shouldn’t deter readers of her bestselling Grief Works (2017) and her latest, Every Family Has a Story – How We Inherit Love and Loss. Samuel is a fluent writer whose empathy and clarity illuminate eight case studies of family therapy from her consulting room. 

Of the 19 million families in the UK today, she observes that “nuclear” is no longer the prevailing model, nor is having children their primary purpose. There are “single-parent families, same-sex families, adopted families, extended families, polyamorous families, blended families, families with no children and families made up of friends in which there are no blood relationships.” Samuel wanted “to look beneath the skin” of different types and ask questions like: “What is it that enables some families to thrive despite enormous adversity when others fragment?” and “Why do our families drive us mad?”

She notes the courage it takes for parents to hear criticism from their children (and vice versa), and her belief that such pain is the necessary “agency of change” that will help transform “stuck” family dynamics. It’s clear this isn’t an easy process, but the way Samuel unfolds each story, describing participants as they wrestle with recent or life-long struggles, makes for drama that’s both readable and relatable. 

Sometimes Samuel’s insight is piercing, such as when Joshua Thompson ‘wanted to make [his wife] feel better [about their children leaving home], and was somehow irritated that he wasn’t enough, that she wouldn’t let him fix her.’ But for me the illuminating thread is Samuel’s honesty in recording and analysing her own inner reactions and preconceptions – her confusion, frustration, sympathy, boredom, joy – and how that builds her sense of the evolving “modern family”. 

Liberalism and Its Discontents
By Francis Fukuyama
(178pp, Profile, £16.99, hb)
Reviewed by Peter Phelps

“At the heart of the liberal project is an assumption about equality,” writes Francis Fukuyama in his latest treatise on liberalism, “an underlying moral core that all human beings share and can recognise in one another.”

As we contemplate the daily horrors delivered to our social feeds from Ukraine, the deliberate atrocities uncovered in Bucha and elsewhere, these words can’t help but jar – not because they misdescribe liberalism, but because of what they expose about the “liberal project”. They’re a reminder that Vladimir Putin himself once described liberal democracy as “obsolete”. A point he seems intent on proving.

These contradictory currents underscore this slim book from the writer of The End of History and the Last Man. Written in 1992 amid the excitement and optimism accompanying the end of the Cold War, his previous work argued that liberal democracy was the “endpoint” of our “ideological evolution”. Even then, Fukuyama’s analysis was heavily caveated, but this has been largely forgotten, leaving the author regularly derided for hubristic naivety.

This latest work benefits from the hindsight of the decline in world stability and the challenges to democracy of the last 30 years, and is inevitably a more sober – and sobering – reflection. While maintaining Fukuyama’s life-long defence of liberalism, it analyses in depth the nature and extent of the forces at work globally from both sides of the political spectrum, which have left it – as Fukuyama admits on the first page – “under severe threat around the world”.

And that threat is not just from the rise of the likes of Putin and his authoritarian or totalitarian fellow travellers such as China’s Xi Jinping. If anything, the greater menace comes from within the no-longer-so-free world. Here, Fukuyama picks up from his analysis in another earlier book, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, on how liberalism has “turned in on itself”. The focus on identity politics that characterises certain regions of the world such as the Balkans, Central Asia and parts of Africa – but which has also taken hold in both the US and the UK – lies behind Poland and Hungary’s lurch to the right, the election of Donald Trump and his attacks on American democracy, and Britain’s decision to crash out of the EU (just as the greatest threat to Europe since World War II was mounting in the East). It’s not that those who’ve succumbed to populist skulduggery have suddenly developed authoritarian instincts, Fukuyama argues, but they’re “products of an information and media system that ratifies their prior preferences and supports it through motivated reasoning.” In short, faced with an increasingly uncertain world, many have sacrificed the responsibilities of reasoned democratic judgement in favour of going along with widespread moral certitude.

A major strength of this work, apart from its precise definitions of what constitutes, and what opposes, classical liberalism, is its recognition that much of the criticism is justified; that the principle of equality underpinning liberal thought isn’t matched in practice, with extraordinary inequalities existing in most western countries.  It offers a commanding evisceration of the distortions of so-called “neoliberalism”, shorthand for unfettered global capitalism and its disregard for the importance of social capital. But as brilliant as Fukuyama’s writing is, this book is ultimately better at diagnosing the disease than prescribing the cure.