A look into murky lives

IN THE CLEARING

J.P. Pomare (Hachette, $35)

What happens to the children damaged by the evils inflicted upon them by cruel adults? They become damaged adults who (sometimes) go on to inflict evil upon the next generation.

Freya is one of those damaged children who is now grown up and a single mum to Billy. All alone, she is doing her all to raise her son and keep him safe in a world she is well aware brims with danger. Freya also knows that one of those dangers is her; she is a flawed woman and sometimes her mothering methods left me horrified.

But as her tragic history is gently unfolded she becomes a sympathetic figure. She is a damaged human in a world that cares nothing for the little girls who emerge from the bunkers, from the cellars, from the compounds and are left blinking and bewildered in the after-glare of a media spotlight that has moved on to the next horror.

Freya’s paranoia crackles off the pages and she struggles to “act normal”. She goes about her business, taking Billy to school, teaching yoga classes and watering her garden. But she knows danger is not far away.

And then Billy goes missing. The clickbait for this novel declares a “small town’s dark underbelly is about to be exposed”. No it’s not. This is nothing to do with small towns or their underbellies, beyond the actual setting. In The Clearing is about manipulation and evil and how easily the truth can be twisted — especially when the victims are vulnerable children.

In The Clearing is a multi-layered and thoughtprovoking thriller that plumbs depths of everincreasing depravity but keeps you hooked until the end. As Freya frantically searches for her lost son, a picture slowly emerges from her murky past and even murkier present. Be warned — it’s a bleak picture that will make you want to weep at human cruelty.

J.P. Pomare (pictured) has given us a very human victim/perpetrator. Freya is the sum of her past and would not be believable if she was unscathed. As the search goes on and the only signs of Billy are ominous, we begin to doubt Freya. What has she done? Despite her flaws, she is a sympathetic character that we fret for long after we close the book on her.

Stories like those of Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl remind us that there are children out there, right now, living lives of unimaginable suffering. The Clearing reminds us that they have not been rescued when the locks are opened. And as we leave Freya, she is clearly still vulnerable to her past.