By Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
The Facts of Life and Death
Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press)
*****
We’re a parochial lot, South Africans, quick to claim our own when they make a mark overseas. This is never more true than in the book world. Lauren Beukes is recommended by Stephen King. Ivan Vladislavić is compared to WG Sebald and Paul Auster in the international press. Sarah Lotz lands a six-figure deal with a British publisher. We thumb our keypads with pride, shout it out in cyberspace, beam on the branches of Twitter.
Belinda Bauer may only have spent 10 years here in her adolescence, but we like to think of her as one of ours, too. After all, she’s the sister of Charlotte, the distinguished editor and columnist who divides her time now between Johannesburg and France, and Katy, who produced two perfectly-formed novels, Spite and The Track, in the mid-2000s. There’s a fourth sister, Lizzie, who teaches English and writes plays and short stories in her spare time. I wonder what was in the water in the Bauer household to have produced such talent.
“Books”, says Belinda, on the phone from her home near Cardiff. “The house was full of books and my parents were big readers. There was no point going to them with disputes, they wouldn’t listen. They were too busy reading. So we learned that books were special.”
The field of crime writing is becoming ever-more cluttered as new authors see it as a fast track to a book deal. Too many set about the writing as if they’re constructing Meccano sets, winching in the plot, screwing characters onto it, levering it up with the engineering of conventions. The results are hollow, forgettable books that blow away like pick-up-sticks after you’ve read them.
Bauer’s novels, by contrast, bloom with malevolence, like dripping ink into water, stories that stain the reader’s imagination. She never set out to be a crime writer. Her brilliant first novel, Blacklands, was the story of a boy who starts writing letters to a paedophile in prison. He just wants to know where the convict buried his uncle so that his Nan can have some peace. Just like that, straight out of the gates, she won the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Her publishers told her she was now a crime writer, and who was she to argue?
“I’d never read any crime novels – I still don’t – so I had no idea about the conventions, the precedents. To me Blacklands was about the relationship between a little boy and his grandmother. I was exploring how a terrible crime can ripple down through generations.”
The narrator of her latest book The Facts of Life and Death is 10-year-old Ruby Trick, pudgy and anxious and living in a septic village on the Devon coast. Her dad’s out of work, her mum’s trying to keep things afloat and Ruby frets about the dread word, “divorce”. There’s a man out there murdering young women. He makes them phone their mothers and then kills them on Facetime. If Ruby can help her father catch him, perhaps he’ll love her enough never to leave.
It has all the hallmarks of Bauer’s writing that we’ve come to expect: intense atmosphere, throbbing suspense and terrific twists. It’s no wonder she’s been hailed in the UK as the next Ruth Rendell. And that, for a girl from Pretoria. Almost.
Follow Michele on Twitter @michelemagwood
Book details
- The Facts of Life and Death by Belinda Bauer
EAN: 9780593072790
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