THIS IS HOW
By M..J. Hyland
377 pages (ARC), $19.99, ISBN: 978-1554685011
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This is How, by Booker Prize-nominated British writer M. J. Hyland, is a novel of quiet and unexpected power. It takes a tired set of genre clichés and wakes us up by breathing new life into an age-old question: What makes a man capable of murder?
As a reader, I have a thing against novels that open with the strong sense that something inevitable is going to happen, where we know within a few pages that we are going to be taken to the point where the main character does something he or she shouldn't do and then the rest of the novel is going to play out the consequences. A lot of not-very-good crime fiction fits this formula, novels so predictable I can't even remember their titles.
M. J. Hyland's novel opens in this manner: The voice of the first-person narrator is bland and humourless and maybe even one-sandwich-short-of-a-picnic. We are treated to a slow accumulation of meticulous detail and its attendant resentments and bitterness. Patrick Oxtoby's fiancée has dumped him for no discernible reason; he has moved to an English seaside town and taken up residence in a boarding house that could have existed any time from around 1930 to the present day; he has started a new job where he can show off his excellence as a car mechanic.
"So far, so what?" a reader might think, or at least this reader did initially, but Hyland's careful, clear and lucid prose and her absolute adherence to the complete banality of her narrator and his shabby, uninspiring interior life kept me reading. As with Ishiguro's so-bland-it's-brilliant narrative technique in Never Let Me Go, when the inevitable finally happened, I knew what would come next, but I could not bring myself to stop reading.
This is a book that is difficult to review without giving the story away; suffice to say the second half of the book is set in an English prison. While I have never done time myself, I have done two stints as writer-in-residence in prisons in Britain, and Hyland has captured the devastating combination of epic boredom and knife-edge terror that life inside entails. Here her technique of the slow accumulation of detail interspersed with tiny provoking incidents produces an atmosphere of such authenticity that the familiar smell of prison - sweat, cooking, cigarettes, fear, stale air and worse - comes off the pages.
But on a more profound level, in this literary novel Hyland shows us what most crime fiction never does, or never can, admit: Forget about serial killers, gangsters, mass murderers, psychotics, sociopaths and all the rest of that genre's glamorous beasts; most murders are committed by ordinary people. Most murders happen in the blink of an eye between people who would otherwise call themselves friends, lovers or family. This is How shows us, with piercing exactitude, precisely how Patrick Oxtoby arrives at this horrifying place.
Kate Pullinger's new book The Mistress of Nothing will be published in September. Summer in London never fails to turn her into a homesick British Columbian.
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