Bestseller’s faux-thriller captures pain, depression
Emma Healey follows blockbuster with a tale of mental illness, family
“What are you thinking?” Lana, the teen in Emma Healey’s new faux-thriller, Whistle in the Dark, asks her mother Jen. “What are you thinking about me?”
“I’m not thinking,” her mom answers. “Or, at least, I’m trying my best not to think.” To which Lana replies: “Good, because everything you think is wrong.”
This interaction epitomizes the excruciating motherdaughter dynamic that plays out throughout Whistle in the Dark. The novel opens with Lana in the hospital, bruised and bleeding, having been discovered in a farmer’s field after going missing for four days. Lana is unable to tell anyone — not her parents nor the police — what happened to her.
What follows is a mother’s agonized quest to solve her daughter’s disappearance. We learn that Lana suffers from depression, that she harms herself, that she is no stranger to therapists’ offices. But what is not clear is what events led to her vanishing, what happened while she was gone, and what she’s thinking and feeling now that she’s safely ensconced, or some might say cloistered, in the family home, with Jen monitoring her every move.
Healey is the bestselling young British novelist whose 2014 blockbuster debut, Elizabeth is Missing — about an 80year-old sleuth with dementia (wryly referred to in the press as “Gone Gran”) — won her awards and critical acclaim.
Her second novel, then, has much to live up to. The problem is that it never quite makes up its mind about what kind of book it’s aiming to be. It’s structured, and framed, as a classic “grip-lit” psychological thriller, and yet the reader waits many pages between clues, and suspense fails to build. Add to that, the relentless mother-daughter conflict steers the narrative away from the domain of the thriller, and into coming-of-age and familial drama territory.
Still, it must be said, this is the most literary of commercial fiction outings, with exquisite attention to detail and a masterful depiction of family tension. The portrait of mental illness that emerges is harrowing and haunting, a testament to both Healey’s considerable talent and her courage in tapping her own life experiences, having herself contemplated suicide in her youth.
All told, Whistle in the Dark is troubling — and deeply affecting — novel about mothers, daughters and depression.
The mother-daughter conflict steers the narrative from thriller to coming-of-age and familial drama territory