GROWING UP THE HARD WAY
Novel propels messed-up heroine into adulthood in place of terror
In a Cottage In a Wood Cass Green HarperCollins JAMIE PORTMAN
LONDON Bestselling British crime novelist Cass Green has just delivered the reading public another thoroughly messed-up heroine.
So is this part of a growing trend? One critic wrote recently that readers of her latest thriller might end up wanting to strangle Neve, the conflicted young woman who ends up in a living nightmare after she inherits a spooky old cottage in Cornwall. But the same critic went on to recommend In a Cottage In a Wood, arriving in Canada this month from HarperCollins, as “a gripping story set in a very creepy place.”
Green herself smilingly admits Neve has a “bit of a self-destructive streak” in her. “But I hope as the book goes on that she goes on her own journey and changes by the end of the story.”
The novel manages to be both gripping thriller and unsettling psychological study. And yes, Green is quick to agree that female crime novelists seem to be racking up big sales with books featuring screwed-up female protagonists.
Examples include the alcoholic loser Paula Hawkins writes of in The Girl on the Train and the scheming temptress in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
So is the crime fiction genre now embracing a new sub-division — that of the self-destructive heroine?
“I’m not sure,” Green says. “I just think they’re more fun to write about.”
Green began her writing career as a science journalist before successfully turning to fiction for young people. But when she began working on her first adult thriller, The Woman Next Door, she also realized she enjoyed giving her characters major flaws.
“A lot of reviewers didn’t like either of the key characters in The Woman Next Door,” she says. “But the book did very well, and I think it was because the characters were interesting.” When she read Gone Girl, it also had an impact, making her even more attracted to the idea of unsympathetic female characters. “Having conflicts inside them makes them complex.”
Her new novel begins ominously on London’s Waterloo Bridge in the dead of night — an opening that gives us our first insight into the maddening, troubled character of Neve.
She has awakened in a stranger’s bed after yet another disastrous one-night stand. All she wants to do is get home, even though “home” in this instance means a couch in the living room of a sister who is at her wit’s end over Neve’s irresponsible behaviour. After an unpleasant scene with her most recent bed partner, Neve finds herself walking back to her sister’s house at 3 a.m. on a bitterly cold night and still wallowing in selfpity over a world that insists she grow up and take control of her life.
It’s on Waterloo Bridge that she encounters a lone woman clad only in an evening dress. They begin talking — and then, suddenly, this distraught stranger hands Neve an envelope and throws herself into the Thames.
A few weeks later, Neve learns the woman has willed her a remote Cornish cottage. By this time, her life is completely out of control. She has quit her job on a whim, and her sister is on the verge of throwing her out. So, feeling she has no alternative, Neve finds herself in Cornwall taking possession of a frightening cottage with a dead bird in the kitchen sink.
“I had this concept in my mind,” Green says. “What would it be like to step wholesale into another woman’s life? I had a couple of ideas about how to do that, but they weren’t working. But then I had this idea of being given a gift that’s really a poisoned chalice. Then I started to picture that opening scene on Waterloo Bridge.
“I’ve known a lot of people like Neve,” she says in an interview at her publisher’s office. “With her, it’s the idea of turning 30 and not feeling quite grown up. I don’t think I do myself, and I’m much older than she is. I often have this conversation with friends — when are we ever going to feel properly grown up? I’m married and I’ve got two children and have a career — so I suppose you can say I’m grown up even though I may not be sure in my own mind that I am.
“In Neve’s case the question is more extreme. She’s attracted to the idea of a sort of extended youth — still without any sense of responsibility even after reaching a new decade.”
Neve finds herself tested as never before when her Cornwall cottage becomes a place of terror. But what’s unusual about Green, in an age when such fellow female crime novelists as Mo Hayder and Val McDermid often venture into excruciatingly violent territory, is that she creates suspense and fear through subtle use of atmosphere and suggestion.
In so doing, she’s merely trying to write the sort of fiction she enjoys reading herself. It’s not graphic violence that frightens her. It’s that sense of the dark and unseen.
“Whenever I’m reading a book or watching a film, I don’t like gore or extreme violence,” Green says. “It’s that uneasy sense of suspense that really gets under my skin, I enjoy being frightened by things like that. That’s what I was trying to do here, having this sense of unease about what my character is being put through. And if I’ve managed to do that, I’ll be very pleased.”
Green also delights in conveying place. “Waterloo Bridge late at night is very atmospheric,” she says. As for Cornwall, “It’s unique — one of my favourite places in the world. I was there with my family this past summer.”
But the deadly cottage of the novel is entirely a product of her imagination. “I actually feel a bit guilty about creating it,” she laughs.
“A cottage in Cornwall sounds absolutely beautiful. But not this time!”