The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book perfectly illustrates that whole frog-in-boiling-water scenario.
it starts out in a fairly straightforward way, telling the story of ruth, an elderly, widowed woman living alone in a remote beach house in australia. she has two grown sons, with busy lives and children of their own, who phone her periodically, but her life is largely solitary and lonesome. she has a tendency to sit around and meditate on the past – on her missed opportunities, and on the happiest times of her life, when she was a young woman living in fiji.
one night, she is awakened by hearing what she believes to be a tiger in her house. she phones one of her sons, and although he tells her she is just dreaming, he is concerned about her mental state and the practicality of her continuing to live alone.
the next morning a woman named frida arrives, claiming to be sent by the government to assist ruth with her household chores, for just a few hours a week. ruth believes frida is from fiji, and her increasing presence in ruth’s life begins to intensify her memories and to open doors ruth had considered long-closed.
and then the slow simmer begins.
we have an unreliable narrator in ruth, a daydreamy woman whose age has begun to affect her memory and her perception. and we have frida, a woman who may be more, or less, than she appears.
we have a story in which the reader becomes immersed, slowly realizing that troubling things are happening, ever so subtly, whose ramifications are going to be far-reaching and devastating, but are not consciously registered until they are too obvious to ignore.
we have a book that is nearly impossible to review without spoilers.
it’s a very delicately-rendered story about aging, manipulation, dependence, and trust. it is about the often treacherous bond between women, and what inner strength remains in someone whose life is slowly being chipped away. it’s about the hope and possibilities and romance that unexpectedly appear, and the things that can be overlooked when an empty life suddenly becomes full again. it’s about choosing not to see, and how quickly trust can grow in people who live in social isolation .
this is a masterful psychological suspense story which is sort of magical-realism, but sort of an all-too-true cautionary tale, and for a first-novel, it is a stunner.
