Review | Paula Hawkins throws us in at the deep end for the follow-up to her global bestseller
Hawkins follows The Girl on the Train with a story of deaths, misogyny and violence against women going back centuries. But will it be another record-breaker?
by Paula Hawkins
Riverhead Books
Literary sensations don’t come much bigger than Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (2015). A hypnotic, queasy psychological thriller that tapped into our inner voyeur, it broke records even before its disappointing Hollywood adaptation. Worldwide sales have topped 15 million copies, with three million in the United States alone.
Hawkins has now released the follow-up, Into the Water, which, if nothing else, doesn’t have the word “girl” in the title. If Hawkins was tempted to cash in again on this trend (Gone Girl, Girl with Various Tattoos), she would have needed “girls”, plural.
The new story describes the macabre deaths of several young women, all by drowning, all in the town of Beckford. While some of the “girls” died by their own hand, others were the victim of foul play. As the action begins, it is unclear which describes Danielle “Nel” Abbott, whose death ensures she doesn’t finish her book about the so-called Drowning Pool.
The first victim was Libby Seeton, who was drowned in 1679 during a witch trial. Her murder seems to unleash something wicked, misogynistic and otherworldly. Supposedly to be found in the northeast of England, Beckford is less a place than a state of mind. What details we learn (a school, shops, a church) are submerged beneath an atmosphere thick with despair, paranoia, secrets and barely contained violence.
Then again, this is England, and provincial small-town England at that. People who live in this self-consciously nice world cover up murder with politeness and cups of tea, smiling awkwardly as they plan violence.
If the number of victims has escalated in Hawkins’ second novel, so, too, have the narrators. Instead of Rachel Watson’s singular slippery perspective, we now have no fewer than 11 (including a posthumous Nel in her unfinished book). This fractured narrative fractures still further in the telling. As with The Girl on the Train, Into the Water is heavy with drinking, adultery, treachery, love and lies, all of which smudge our narrators’ perception of truth. Add in the simple instability of memory and even the simplest statement cannot be trusted.