Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott
My rating: 4/5 cats
i really liked this, but i can totally understand why others do not—it is a very frustrating book if the structure just isn’t your thing. if you are an impatient person; someone who wants their answers RIGHT FRIGGIN’ NOW!, then this book is gonna make you want to throw it. it is a weaving, meandering, teasing book; one whose flaws i completely acknowledge, but which flaws did not diminish my enjoyment of the story at all.
it is about a man whose wife is murdered, and its central mystery is how? and by whom? and why??
typical mystery fare.
but the story is going to take a while to unpack itself.
rachel and alex met at oxford and dated briefly. rachel was a shining star of the english department and she and two other students, cissie and anthony, studied under browning scholar harry gardner, and maintained an intensely close circle, shades of the secret history. the three students developed reputations for debauchery after many public displays of drinking and sexual misconduct, and were feared, loathed, admired and envied by the rest of the student body. when cissy and anthony fail to return to oxford one semester, and she finds herself alone and adrift, rachel and alex become close, until she breaks it off suddenly and unexpectedly.
years later, alex is attending the wedding of his best friend richard, his only friend from oxford, where he runs into rachel, for whom he has been pining all these years. after a welcome-back-blowie in the courtyard, they are wed the next day.
these things happen.
and for a while, it is all wonderful. he has become a very successful lawyer, and can afford all the finer things, and his wealth allows rachel the freedom to write and they are blissfully happy and in love. except that she refuses to talk about her past, about the students she was once inseparable from, and about the woman who raised her after she was orphaned at a young age. but that’s a minor speed bump—they are living the dreeeeeam, and alex has never been happier—in the arms of a woman he has loved nearly his whole life.
until they take a weekend trip back to oxford for a dinner with harry gardner, and rachel is murdered.
after alex has been cleared of the murder, the police have no leads, and it seems the case will never be solved, he is suddenly summoned again by harry, who decides to tell alex everything he knows, which is substantial, and let alex make up his mind about what to do with the information. so—easy-peasy! this should be cleared up in three pages. but, no.
instead, the story is drawn out like taffy, while alex listens to harry tell the story at his own pace, pausing frequently over the course of a couple of days when the telling becomes too much for harry, emotionally. alex himself seems to be in no hurry to hear the answer, as he drifts in and out of the explanations, becoming distracted by a photograph that unleashes memories of rachel in her youth, by a book, by a reverie, half-listening, half-remembering, slowly putting the pieces together. letters and other pieces of evidence will be given to him, and he will only look at them days later, people will fall asleep in the middle of stories, huge important details will be forgotten, only to be remembered at just the right moment, and eventually, all the secrets rachel tried so hard to keep will be revealed.
it sounds kind of dopey, and it is, but she is a good enough writer that the things that are so maddening about it are also captivating. it is narcotizing in the best possible way. you will want to shake all the characters, but you will also be compelled to find out what happens.
rachel is mostly a horrorshow—one of those charismatic people who ensnares others and leaves an indelible mark. for some, this will take the shape of an unflagging infatuation, and for others, it will drive them to murder. she’s awful, yeah, a canny woman trying to escape the mistakes of her past in the arms of someone stable and unchallenging. alex’s obvious devotion is useful to her, but it would be cynical to believe she wasn’t genuinely happy. it’s complicated.
this is the second book in a row i have read, both by female novelists, in which the love object is a beautiful, vivacious, and fairly selfish (very selfish in this book) woman who leaves her man for a flimsy reason, and his response is to put the rest of his life on hold, waiting for her return. i’m not sure if this is some kind of fantasy i have never had, but it strikes me as one of those melodramatic, wuthering heights passions that makes sense on the moors, but in a contemporary setting just seems implausible and toxic.
but i gotta say, for all its frustrating bits, the story is really engaging, but then i really love slow-moving psychological suspense stories that take their sweet time. the book is flawed, the characters are flawed, but i enjoyed every minute of it, even when i was shouting “open the damn letter, you ninny!”
good times.
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goodreads climate making me too saddish to review lately.
instead, tonight i will make banana muffins and watch project runway.
but review is coming. read blair’s for now!!
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