Book Review Saturday – ‘The Shining Girls’

I can’t quite believe, after so many months of wanting to get my hands on ‘The Shining Girls’, that I’ve finally read it. It’s been experienced. I can never experience it again. Time’s sort of funny like that, isn’t it? It only goes one way.

Unless you’re Harper Curtis, that is.

Image: forbiddenplanet.co.uk

‘The Shining Girls’ has one of the best central ideas I’ve ever heard of – a serial killer who can travel through time, meaning that his crimes are pretty much impossible to connect to one another. In other words, he is untraceable, unstoppable and terrifying. Harper Curtis is this serial killer, a man who has been psychopathic from childhood (a chapter detailing his role in an accident involving his older brother, a truck and an unpulled handbrake was, to me, one of the most chilling episodes in the entire novel – and Harper was only eleven at that time.)

Early in the book, we see him gain access to a mysterious House, one with eerie capability; he comes across the key to this House through committing an act of violence, and that same violence powers the House. At various junctures in the book, when characters peer in the windows, the House looks like a rundown flophouse, ransacked and ramshackle and unfit for human habitation. But when Curtis enters (along with several other characters, who seem to be able to ‘see’ the House properly), it becomes a well-appointed, attractive place with fixtures and fittings from Chicago in the 1930s. When he opens the front door again, Curtis steps out into an entirely different reality, years in the future. The time-travel has sensible limits on it; Curtis is always in Chicago, and he cannot seem to travel to any point earlier than 1929 or later than 1993, but he always has one thing on his mind – the destruction of the Shining Girls.

And who are the Shining Girls? They are young women who burn and sparkle with potential. They are dancers, performers, scientists, journalists, architects, welders, wives, widows, maidens, mothers… all manner of womanhood is here. For reasons we are never truly privy to, these girls must die, and their potential – their shine – must be quenched.

Curtis has been murdering women since the 1930s, taking a token from each woman and leaving it on the body of another victim. When he first arrived in the House, he saw a list of names scrawled on a wall, in his own handwriting, and he knew what he was going to do – in a way, because he had already done it. His actions were inevitable. We encounter him first in 1974, when he meets the six-year-old Kirby Mazrachi, who we know is one of the Shining Girls. The darkness within Curtis as he interacts with the innocent Kirby is like a miasma around him, like a stench emanating from him. I’ve never been so repulsed by a character, and I mean that as a compliment to Lauren Beukes’ writing. We see him give Kirby a plastic horse, a toy which becomes vital to her story at the end of the book, and we know he will be back at some point in her future.

Kirby meets Curtis again in 1989, when he attempts to murder her. Out of all his victims, she is the only one to survive – and, at that, only by pure chance. For a long time Curtis thinks he has been successful in killing her, but when he realises that she survived, he becomes determined to finish what he started.

I wanted to love this novel. It’s exactly the kind of thing I enjoy – time travel, compelling characters (particularly compelling female characters), an excellent core concept, a bit of mystery, psychological intrigue, crime – but I can’t say that I did. I really, really liked it, and I would recommend it, but… I’m not sure. There was something missing, for me, at the end, perhaps as a consequence of having spent so many months looking forward to reading it. Some readers were disappointed by the fact that a lot of the mystery at the core of Curtis’ time travelling ability is left unexplained, but that didn’t bother me at all. I was perfectly willing to accept that this House (it deserves the initial capital, believe me) was able to transport its occupants to any point in its own timeline, and I was perfectly willing to accept that it would draw a man like Harper Curtis to itself in order to carry out the murders it felt were necessary. I loved the concept of the ‘shine’, the potential for greatness that existed within each of the victims, even though they were divided by time, race, sexuality, ability and age; I loved every character (from the point of view of how well they were created, that is, not an actual ‘love’ of their personalities.) I can see why some readers would find it hard to suspend their disbelief, but it didn’t cause any issues for me. I loved how Beukes handled her time-travel. Still, having said all that, something about the ending felt flat.

I don’t want to say too much for fear of giving away pertinent details, because this is the sort of book you really don’t want to spoil for other readers. I will say this much: I read it all in one sitting, I found it hard to put to one side, and Lauren Beukes is a massively talented writer. The story is gripping, though a little hard to keep straight in your head due to the shifting, hopping timelines, and the crime sections are gruesome but extremely compelling. The investigation Kirby launches against the man who almost murdered her is a bit so-so, but the reader has to remember that this part of the book is set in the early 1990s when investigation techniques were not what they are now (I’ve read several reviews of this book which slam her weak investigation into her attacker – but it was a pre-internet age, we can’t forget), and I really enjoyed reading about the lives of the Shining Girls, each of them interesting enough for a novel in their own right.

The book is gory, with scenes of extreme and misogynistic violence, and I do think readers need to be aware of that. It’s not an easy book to read, but it’s a powerful and important book, and as such I would recommend it. The statement Beukes is making – that the world itself conspires, at times, to snuff out the light of its Shining Girls – is one that needs to be heard and heeded.

Happy weekend, y’all. Happy reading!

Learning from the Past

Good morning. It’s one of these:

Image: tumblr.com

Despite this, I hope you’re doing reasonably well so far. If it’s any consolation, think of this: schoolchildren all over Ireland are returning to classes today after their two-week Easter break. The sound of them being ripped out of their beds and flung out their front doors, wailing about how everything in the universe is unfair, is filling the air all around. You’d almost feel sorry for them.

Today’s post, I fear, may be slightly on the depressing side. I just wanted to warn you in case you’d prefer to go off and make a cup of tea, or have your breakfast, or whatever it is you might be doing. I want to talk about history, and the value of learning the lessons history has to teach us, and ask questions like ‘why do we hurt one another over things that aren’t, on balance, worth hurting one another over?’ As with most of my profound moments, this one was born out of my television viewing, so you can blame the BBC for what follows.

As we are wont, last night The Husband and I sat down to watch our regular antiques programme after a busy, and lovely, day spent with friends. Sometimes, watching this hour of TV is a mistake from my point of view. I tend to get very emotional at times when objects with huge personal and/or historical significance are being described, or when a person is talking about something that is deeply meaningful to the history of their family. Last night, of course, was no exception. A woman was interviewed about her family treasure – a collection of letters and documents relating to her father, who was an active member of the Norwegian resistance during World War Two – and I found it profoundly moving. She had kept the shoes he’d worn when he escaped from an internment camp, where he’d been placed after he was caught spying on a German military facility and which he’d worn as he trekked to freedom. She showed a photograph of him demonstrating a technique he and his brothers (one of whom was tortured to death by the Nazis) had developed as children in Norway for getting around in snowy weather – she called it ‘tree-hopping’. It basically involved using the supple trees as pole-vaults, and launching yourself from one tree to the next instead of walking through the snow. He’d used this technique to escape from his captors – not only did it give him speed, but it also helped him to leave no tracks. It was amazing to think that a game he’d played as a young man would one day save his life.

Then, before we went to bed, we switched on the news and learned about the troubles currently besieging Cairo. As of last night, the rioting around a Christian church in that city, which has so far claimed the lives of five people, was being blamed on a piece of graffiti that had been misinterpreted.

A piece of graffiti that had been misinterpreted. I still can’t quite believe it.

Someone had daubed a swastika on a wall, and someone else had interpreted it as a cross – the symbol of Christianity. The wall upon which the daubing had been done happened to be that of an Islamic centre. Because of that – because the symbol was misconstrued as a cross, and not because it was a swastika – rioting began, and five people have so far been killed. My husband even made the point that the swastika symbol may have been the ancient version, the one still held sacred in the religions of the East, instead of the one we in the West would be more familiar with – the one used by the Nazi regime. Either way, and no matter what was intended by the use of the symbol, the frightening thing is that ignorance of what it meant, and a misunderstanding of the intention behind it, has led to horrifying violence and a standoff which is still happening.

The contrast between these two pieces of television, one in which the messages and lessons of the past were clearly in evidence, and one in which the consequences of forgetting about the past, or not learning from the horrors that humanity has already put behind itself, was stark. I was disgusted that people had been killed out of something as simple as a misunderstanding, and a misunderstanding born out of a lack of knowledge, and it underlined my conviction that learning from the mistakes made by our forebears is a hugely important thing – perhaps the most important thing – that we, as a culture, are given charge of.

Why is human life seen to be so cheap sometimes? We were at a Christening yesterday, and nothing would give you more of an appreciation for how precious and beautiful life is than to watch babies being celebrated by their families in this way. There were four babies being christened yesterday, and every one of them was a treasure. The church was full of children – the families, siblings, cousins and so on of the babies being christened – and the place was bedlam with noise, crying, laughter, and the other small cacophanies that tend to follow little people around. How do we go from treasuring our tiniest people to murdering one another over a splodge of red paint on a wall?

Anyway. Happy Monday. Let’s hope that things get better from here.

Image: voxxi.com

 

 

Wednesday Write-In #30

overdose  ::  mither  ::  gloss over  ::  poach  ::  digest

 

‘Just hang on a bloody minute,’ said Katie. ‘You’re not telling me you feel sorry for her, are you?’

‘Oh, come on, Kates,’ I said. ‘She did take an overdose, after all.’

‘Overdose, my eye. I’d like to go in and give her a second helping,’ she muttered.

‘That’s an awful thing to say!’ Even for you, I didn’t add.

‘Grow up,’ she snapped, glaring at me. ‘She didn’t poach your boyfriend from out under your nose. All right?’ Her eyes filled. ‘Until you’re sitting where I am, you can just shut it.’ She squeezed her eyes closed and wiped her nose with the heel of her hand.

I bit my lip, deciding I’d gloss over the fact that Katie and Frank hadn’t really been going out. Not in the proper sense of the word. He’d told me they never made things exclusive, at least. Katie was just being dramatic, as usual. I began to stroke her arm in what I hoped was a comforting way.

‘Leave off,’ she told me after a few minutes. ‘You’re starting to mither me.’ I snapped my hand back like I’d been burned.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. I was useless in these sorts of situations. ‘Just trying to help.’ She sighed deeply and didn’t answer me for a few moments. Her fingers scrubbed at her forehead, her nails lightly scratching her skin. I watched the tiny pale tracings as they flared and faded, bright against the redness of her face. She always got a high colour when her temper spiked.

‘You know what we can do, though,’ she announced, suddenly. She flicked the last tears out of her eyes and fixed me with an intense stare. ‘We can go through his phone.’

 ‘We can what?’ A firework of nerves started to fizz inside me. Keep calm, Allie. Keep calm.

‘Go through his phone,’ she repeated, settling herself more comfortably in her seat. Her face started to return to its normal colour as she started to put her plan together. ‘For texts, and maybe even emails. See what he’s really been up to.’ She drummed her nails on the plastic tabletop as she thought. ‘He’s in work today, so his phone will be at home. I’m sure the lads will let me into the flat. I can say I want to cook him a fancy dinner, and you’re lending a hand.’ She sucked on her bottom lip, her eyes gleaming. I was doing my best to digest this, work through it to its logical conclusion. My throat started to burn.

‘But – look. Do you even have his code? For the phone, I mean?’ I tried to keep my voice calm. ‘This is crazy, Kate!’

‘Of course I have his code,’ she said, in a pitying tone. ‘It’s the first thing I made sure to find out! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t check your boyfriend’s phone?’ Her eyes took on a strange gleam. ‘Oh, but you’d have to get a boyfriend first, I suppose.’ She shot me a glacial grin, which I ignored.

‘What’s the point, though? What are you trying to prove?’ I said, hoping she wouldn’t hear the wobble in my words. I felt cold, suddenly, despite the warm sunshine pouring through the café window.

‘If he did it with one,’ she said, unfolding her legs and getting to her feet, ‘he’ll have done it with more.’ She started to pull her jacket on. ‘And I’m going to put every last one of them in the hospital.’ She laughed, mirthlessly, as she pulled her long hair free of her jacket, letting it stream down her back. It gleamed in the sunshine. ‘Maybe they’ll put ‘em all in the same ward. At least he won’t have to go far when he wants to visit his little harem.’

I didn’t move. My hands were wrapped, white-knuckled, around my cold cup of coffee. I was trying to imagine myself in traction, and not liking the thought.

‘Well?’ she said, looking down at me like a headmistress. Like a tombstone, from the point of view of the grave. ‘Are you coming, or aren’t you?’