Mary Horlock
Text Publishing
Otago Daily Times, June 18th 2011
“My name is Catherine Rozier, please don’t call me Cathy. If you do I’ll jump. I’m not bluffing. It’s a 3000-foot drop and even though I’m fat, I’m not fat enough to bounce.”
This is possibly the best opening I have read in years, and Mary Horlock’s debut novel lives up to the promise of those first few lines. Catherine has just killed her best friend, and although you might think such a crime would be impossible to conceal in a place as small as Guernsey everybody thinks it was a tragic accident. But this is a community that is used to keeping secrets, so she is writing it all down. In so doing she intends to expose the truth both about herself and the island.
Guernsey was captured during WWII, and Islanders were almost outnumbered by German troops. Resistance was limited, albeit inventive (my favourite being the removal all the road signs to confuse the unwelcome visitors) and the line between survival and collaboration was indistinct at best. After the war, communities chose to forget or deny much of what happened, even though the physical remnants of occupation remain to this day. This is a story Catherine is uniquely placed to tell; Her father was a historian who spent his life documenting the complex truth of the war years and after his death she has immersed herself in his papers. Included among them is the story of his brother Charlie, whose actions directly or indirectly killed their father, and Catherine’s confession is interspersed with that of her uncle.
Many first-person novels fail because the author is unable to create and maintain a register appropriate for the central character, and one of the most impressive aspects of the novel is the way it switches between two very different and entirely believable voices. Catherine is smart, engaging, and sarcastic; her narrative is littered with footnoted asides that are as funny as they are informative (‘Luxembourg is a bit like Guernsey, because it is also small and boring, has no taxes and is full of rich people’), and her story will be uncomfortably familiar to anybody who has grown up a social outsider in a small-town story. Charles’ testimony is scattered with phrases in the local patois, and although he was a similar age to Catherine at the time of the Occupation, his voice and is tinged with weariness and regret. The story itself may be fictional but the events he describes are grounded in the memories of those who lived through them.
Despite their differences there is a sense that history is repeating itself, and the two strands of the story unfold in parallel to reveal truths that are much more complicated that than they initially appear. Engrossing, moving and tragi-comic, The Book of Lies had me at ‘Hullo’ and kept me to the very end.
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/no-bluffing-two-debut-novels-live-early-promises
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