Review | The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins’ new novel, A Slow Fire Burning, is a whodunit on an Agatha Christie scale
- Paula Hawkins’ third novel reduces the part of London in which it is set to a village, one populated by damaged characters who bear grudges and hidden burdens
- These are revealed when two deaths rock the community and police are called in. There is no genius detective here, however – so who’ll solve the crimes?
A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins pub. Riverhead Books
A Slow Fire Burning is the latest page-turner from Paula Hawkins, the Zimbabwean-born author of the immensely successful The Girl on the Train (2015).
Towards the front of Hawkins’ third novel is a map of a part of inner London identifying the homes of seven characters. Five of them have committed various thefts: money, keys, jewellery, notebooks and life stories, and the other two – mother and estranged son – have died just weeks apart.
Here they are in approximate order of appearance: Irene, a self-described “cliché of old age”; damaged, uninhibited Laura (wrong in the head and body); handsome, troubled, murdered Daniel; damaged, ugly Miriam (she sees a potential alliance with Laura); bereft Carla, stranded between grief and connection; drunken, failed, dead Angela; and plagiarist has-been author Theo.
All live or lived within a short walk of each other (and each chapter switches to a different character’s perspective). In Hawkins’ hands, this bit of London is depicted not as part of the great metropolis but as a village centred on Regent’s Canal, an Agatha Christie scale of setting where all suspects interact and overlap.
At times the chains of theft and rediscovery read more like farce than thriller, as a key and a knife move from home to home, pointing investigators in contradictory directions.
The book centres on Daniel’s murder and Angela’s seemingly accidental death, but some characters were formed – former lives irrecoverable – by two additional deaths. Fifteen years earlier the very young son of Carla and Theo (who are separated but spend much of their time together) had died from a fall while supposedly in the care of Carla’s sister, Angela:
Carla and Theo blamed themselves and each other endlessly; every sentence began with an “if”.
If you hadn’t gone to the conference … […]
If we had taken him to my parents …
Their hearts were broken, shattered forever, and no amount of love – no matter how deep, how fierce – could mend them.
We also discover that, as a teenager, Miriam had been kidnapped while hitchhiking with a friend. She had escaped but the friend had been murdered and the murderer was never arrested. Miriam is emotionally scarred by the incident, and physically by the broken glass she climbed over to free herself. Both this horrific crime and her telling of the story are pivotal.
All characters are traumatised and/or confused, most are impulsive and bear grudges against one another or their relatives.
Laura is covered in blood following Daniel’s death, but Theo is the one who is incapable of forgiving either his sister-in-law Angela or her son Daniel.
For the investigations and serial arrests, there are professional police officers, but they are forgettable plodders – no self-confident, charismatic Poirot here – and Laura (perhaps like the reader) forgets their names as soon as hearing them. It could be that one of the book’s mysteries is not so much whodunit as who’ll solve it.
A Slow Fire Burning also contains a kind of hidden essay on the nature of fiction and writing. It opens with an italicised page-and-a-half of clichéd rubbish: “Her face is a mask of terror, her heart is a drum …”
Fortunately, this is from a book 80-year-old Irene picks up and throws down in a charity shop – Hawkins’ writing improves from there onwards. This dose of appalling prose does signal a popular current in popular fiction: its defence against snobbish literariness.
Authors are often terrible people, especially in popular fiction, and Theo is self-absorbed and desperate. His major success has come from plagiarism and perhaps he will kill to keep that secret. As well as interspersing extracts from Theo’s work, A Slow Fire Burning name-checks Sally Rooney (as a writer of quality), and Agatha Christie as the monarch of the genre’s Golden Age.
Hawkins may even stand up for the real over the fictional. Angela had died just eight weeks before her son’s killing, falling drunk down the stairs. Through Irene, we know that, “In fiction, that would never stand.”
As part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, on Nov 13, Paula Hawkins’ hybrid event takes place 7pm-8pm, at JC Cube, Tai Kwun. Visit festival.org.hk for more details.
