Even though
Rosamund Lupton's debut novel Sister worried me as it began
with the salutation of a letter addressed to her sister [that type of
narrative can be tedious], she surprises with a fresh and unusual
approach to a story of familial relationships and the grief of loss.
When Bee's mother
calls her in New York City to tell her that her younger sister Tess
is missing in London, career centered Bee hops a plane, leaves fiancé
and job behind, and sets herself up in her sister's flat to seek
answers to her disappearance.
When Tess is found
dead and the coroner and police rule it a suicide, everyone abandons
the investigation. Bee knows her sister too well to believe this
conclusion as she would not take her own life and “subject those
she loves to such grief.”
Thus, Bee begins
her own inquiry into what really happened to her sister, and along
the way, as Lupton drags us into the single-focused mind of Bee, she
provides some well-done twists and turns. The bonus of the book comes in the thriller like atmosphere of Bee's search.
In addition, Lupton's just good at writing as her strength
lies in her understanding of the bonds of family, especially in a
family familiar with death and loss; her descriptions of the pit of
grief seem to be ones that only some one with a first-hand knowledge could provide.
Bee fully shares her anguish. She captures Bee's brokenness, one that seems representative of a person who loses the hope that a loved one will be found and slides, screaming and flailing, into the reality of the finality of a tragic and violent death for that person.
Bee fully shares her anguish. She captures Bee's brokenness, one that seems representative of a person who loses the hope that a loved one will be found and slides, screaming and flailing, into the reality of the finality of a tragic and violent death for that person.
Her prose led
me to pause with its raw honesty as well as insightful observance of modern
life.
Chillingly done.
One of the passages that really resonated with me, so much so that I marked it to make note of here, describes Bee's thoughts at the location of her sister's death, which she visits after the closed investigation:
I tried not to think of your being
there for five nights, all alone. I tried to cling to my Chagall
image of your leaving your body, but I couldn't be sure of the time
frame. Did you leave your body, as I so fervently hoped, the moment
you died? Or maybe it was later, when you were found, when your body
was seen by someone other than your murderer. Or was it in the
morgue when the police sergeant pulled back the blanket and I
identified you – did grief release you?
The bouquets[laid at the death scene] made sense to me now.
Decent people were trying to fight evil with flowers, the good
fighting under the pennants of bouquets. I had not understood before
why anyone would think a family whose child had been shot would want
a teddy. But now I did; against the sound of gunshots, a thousand
compassionate soft toys muffled a little their reverberating horror.
“Mankind is not like this,” the offerings say, “we are not like
this. The world isn't only this way.”
See what I mean?
:-)
Oh my.
ReplyDeleteThriller and mystery types are not for me... to active of imagination! I still get the willies from reading one such book as a teenager. Yikes. Sure glad you liked it though ;-)
Blessings.