Broken Harbour - brilliant madness, but.....

        When I read Lesley's review of Broken Harbour here, I thought to myself, all right, I must be missing something.  I mean, Broken Harbour is nominated for an award this year.  Why am I the only one who has difficulty with it?  What am I missing in this book?  Because, you see, I have a confession to make:  I both loved and hated this book.
                           

What I loved:
     Okay, Broken Harbour is brilliant in places.  I really liked the main character, Mick Kennedy, and his family.  His mother's madness and what it did to the family is one of the best pieces I have read on family secrets and how they destroy everyone from the inside out.  Mick's sense of needing to control everything comes from this.  His inability to work with anyone, and his desire to be in control in everything, especially in pursuing evidence and interviews, is insightful and clever.  This was the most gripping part of the book for me, the revelation through the book of Mick's family and what happened to them at Broken Harbour.

The mystery itself was really well done.  I couldn't take my eyes off the page.  There I was that Sunday in February, reading the book intently, planning with one part of my mind how long it would take me to read it in one sitting, and if anyone would mind if Sunday dinner were really late, say after 8 pm, so I could keep reading straight through to the end.  I did not want to stop. That's how good the first half is.  Then suddenly! Bam!

   There I sat, blinking dazedly in the dining table (where I do a lot of my reading when the family is home.)  What had just happened?  I was thrown out of the book at the point when Richie, Mick's new and young partner, and Mick are going through the chief suspect's home.  Richie finds something, but it is not until the end of the book that we learn what it is.  At the moment that he finds it, his sudden change of character shocked me.  It threw me out.  But it wasn't just that, it was as Mick gets the phone call pointing to more evidence that the husband is the killer.  I think I might have said out loud, "but he didn't!"  and  as I sat there in the dining room, I realized I was upset with the story.  It wasn't the husband.  It was the wife.  I knew it.  And I did something I haven't done in many many years: I read the ending, to see if I was right.

I eventually two days later went back and read the rest of the book.  I'm glad I did, because I saw the rest of what Mick had become and what happens in the investigation.  But the question I was left with was, how could the killer have done it?  I was shocked that I was suddenly out of the story like that.  Something wasn't right in the telling, and it's taken me most of these weeks to figure out what it was.

What I don't believe in the book:  
     This is what bothered me so much:  I kept waiting for someone in the family that is murdered, the mother or the father, to be revealed to have some history of mental illness or depression.  It was the only thing that made sense.  And it wasn't there.  The slow deterioration of the father, the wife's panic as their live unraveled: all well written and believable.  But neither person is shown to have any history of a slight break, depression, anything that would make what happened that night believable.

     What I really wanted, was for the mother to have had some kind of history, that would make what happened believable.  The husband's breakdown is so well-done. That's what economic loss can do to someone who hasn't shown signs of any kind of problem coping before with setbacks.  It was the wife that bothered me. Not just what she did, but why she did it.

My confession:
      I have suffered from depression on and off in my life.  My family suffers from it. Anxiety, stress, and panic attacks.  We all have them.  So when I read about Mick and his family, the great terrible act, and the repercussions on the characters, what happens to each family member is note perfect. I haven't lived through such a terrible event, but there are scars in my family from what depression has done and is doing to all of us.  So this part was gripping and I couldn't look away. It's one of the best accounts of madness and suicide that I have come across in fiction.  Which is why I wanted the same kind of depth or understanding with the murderer, to understand why the act was committed.

It is only today, reading Lesley's fun post and all the comments, and thinking over everyone's general acclaim of this book, that I was able to understand that I wanted the wife to suffer from depression too.  That would have made what happened next in the story, absolutely believable, and so much more horrifying than it already is in the novel.  Because then the breakdown of Ireland's society would fully impact on the broken, the ones least able to protect themselves, and the most vulnerable first. Though I suspect that Tana French wanted to show how the breakdown in the economy could affect normal people,  by which I mean healthy people who don't suffer from mental illness.  I think (and thought while reading it) in this story, why didn't the wife just pick up the kids and leave?  So what if she couldn't admit their live wasn't perfect?  Is that excuse enough to do what she  did?  Or why not get her husband the help he needed?  I know why she did it, on the surface it makes sense:  the whole family was getting infected by the husband's madness.  But in the secret places of the mind, where darkness and struggle really live, this book lacks that resonance for me in the wife's story.  I much more believe in Mick's family than I do in what the wife in the victim's family did to hers.

As a breakdown of a seemingly normal family, it is good.  I can see why this book is garnering praise.  It just doesn't fully ring true.  I wish it did.  I wish I didn't know what I know about depression, too.....

So, it's a brilliant mystery novel that mostly succeeds.

Do you agree? Disagree?  Did you love this novel?  Did anyone have any difficulty with it like I did?

Other reviews:
Bibliophile by the Sea
Hey Lady! Whatcha Reading?
Rhapsody in Books
S.Krishna's Books
An Adventure in Reading

If you have read it, please let me know and I'll link to it.

Sylvia Plath - some thoughts when reading how she has influenced other women writers

    Over at The Guardian, they have a wonderful collection of various writers talking about how reading Sylvia Plath affected their writing, and in one marvelous case, what knowing her meant. 

           I forget that Sylvia Plath died the year I was born (1963).  I forget how much her work, her poetry and her one novel, The Bell Jar, opened the way for women to write about what was real for them, especially the real dark emotions that lie under the surface: rage, anger, sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, and despair. 

    Her poems and The Bell Jar don't contain only these emotions, they also have moments of pure beauty, and vivid imagery that pulsates with life and blood and desire.  Her poems aren't polite.  They ripped open the facade of being a woman in the 1950's and 1960's, with that same dissatisfaction that Betty Freidan was about to reveal in The Feminine Mystique.  Plath's work  burns with desire for honesty, for the truth, to say what is obvious to her, that polite society and nice women never, ever speak of.  She tore the roof off of her world, opening herself up to all the feelings in her heart and soul, and she blazed a path for everyone who came after her.

Her poetry came to me when I was 18 and had just left home for the first time.  Alone, it seemed, I was ready to face some of the reasons why I left home that young, and her poetry gave me the door to recognize similar feelings in me of anger, of betrayal, of loss, as well as a way to try to describe these in poems.  I didn't know these could be written as poetry.  That's what Sylvia gave me most of all, the realization that everything can be made into a poem, if you can find the clarity and words to show the ideas and feelings in a way that has harmony and art to it, and even beauty.

 And yet she could be funny - I remember laughing out loud reading The Bell Jar, as well as crying, and wincing at her descriptions of the shock therapy while in the institution.  She was sarcastic, and ironic, and I had the feeling reading her, that if we could have met, we might have spoken the same kind of language.  She felt like a kindred spirit, albeit much cleverer, more passionate and far more open than I could ever be.  

She is still an influence on me today, as I strive to be honest in my poems, to write truthfully about what I really feel and why.  I am afraid of her, too, and Anne Sexton, because I admire their poetry so much, and it wasn't enough to save them from their despair, so it seems bleak and naive for me to think that art can save, and yet I do.  No one ever said that being a poet was easy, and a woman poet with children has to balance motherhood with writing.  Both of these women left their children eventually, both giving up to despair and committing suicide.  For a long time I fought being a poet because I did not want to be like them.  And of course, it's only because that darkness runs in me too, that their poetry is both pleasure and dangerous for me. I have had to find my own strength against that darkness, and I write about that too sometimes.  I have often asked myself what is poetry, if it's about something that isn't beautiful?  Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, are some of the poets that laid the way for women to speak the truth as poets, and as women. Most of all, I eventually realized that not all poets - or writers - are suicidal or unbalanced. Despair was something else about which they could write, but it didn't make them poets.  Both their deaths are a tragic loss, and it's not why they are remembered, thankfully.  It's their wonderful, deep, magical, brutal, fiery poetry that matters.

I owe a debt to Sylvia Plath, and reading the reflections of the writers and poets on The Guardian, I find I am not alone.  I am discovering now that I want to go back and reread her again, to see what she has to teach me now.  That's is something I love about art and poetry and literature.  There are levels upon levels of meaning, depending on where you are as a reader or viewer.  It's what makes  a work of art become lasting in a culture,  even when not recognized at first publication.  The work is revealed over time by people coming to it, again and again.  The song or poem or painting reveals itself over time to have brushed some deep level of meaning that ascends that time and place.

 I don't know if Sylvia Plath will still be read 100 years from now, but I hope so.  I think she is an essential part of a young woman's - any woman's -  growth to being able to fully express herself, including all the ways that each woman feels she doesn't fit the culture around her.  I of course don't know if she is timeless, or only for a certain time, though I do know that she is part of my time and my history.

Here is another Guardian Post about Sylvia, just two weeks ago, about an upcoming book about her before she met Ted Hughes -  Mad Girl's Love Song by Andrew Wilson.  There are links in this article to other ones from Ted Hughes sister Olwyn Hughes and the excecutor of Plath's estate , and Plath's  friend Elizabeth Symonds on The Bell Jar. Apparently The Bell Jar has been re-released with a more chick-lit cover, and some are upset.  While the chicklit cover belies what is in the book, I'm happy to see it is still being published. 

Did you, dear Reader, discover Sylvia Plath at some point in your life?  Do you still read her poems?  Did she influence you in some way?