A masterful tale full of suspense
Coady keeps readers on the edge, continually wondering ‘What happens next?’
Thanks to an enticing and propulsive two-bodies-on-a-collision-course plot, it’s easy to foresee Watching You
Without Mecatching the attention of a film-production company.
But even if, eventually, a hack of a screenwriter grossly simplifies Giller Prize-winner Lynn Coady’s fifth novel into a cat-and-mouse yarn, the twists and turns alone would keep us enthralled. Coady has a surgical hand with the mechanics of suspense. Plus, the foundational conflict she’s chosen — an overbearing, far-too-helpful care worker with drinking and anger problems barging in on a vulnerable, grieving and newly divorced woman — surely helps, too.
Thankfully, seasons before any film is shot, there’s Coady to savour. After a long absence, narrator Karen returns home to Halifax following her mother’s death. In Karen’s view, her mother had been a “monster of competence” possessing “a niceness of propriety and parochialism outlined with a filigree border of intolerance.” On a one-month leave from work, Karen flies out of the big city she’s now living in back to her hometown to sort and finalize: box her mother’s possessions, sell the house, and decide the fate of sibling Kelli, a “250pound mentally handicapped woman with a skin condition.” To say that Karen is conflicted about her mother is a radical understatement.
With hands full of practical matters, Karen is also acutely conscious of matters weighing on her mind, including assorted shames that include the “slow, five-year implosion” of her marriage, the burdens of the “family theology,” arguments with her mother “playing on a loop,” and the fate of her sister. Karen has, she declares, been “through the wringer” and yearns for the simplicity of easy decisions. No such luck, she discovers.
Enter Trevor, a “ruddy, freckled, Celtic type” and an apparently helpful, selfless guy who has long been Kelli’s paid helper. He readily offers guidance, a manly shoulder to cry on; the man’s a prince with a sailor’s vocabulary. He’s a tad in Karen’s face, but that’s nothing. Right?
Coady knows that readers will understand the genre’s conventions: if Trevor’s a player, then what’s his game; if he’s an asp, when will he strike; and how will this distracted and overwhelmed woman respond?
Coady builds momentum like a whiz. Aided as well by Karen’s delightful, occasionally snide voice (about “Maritime social etiquette,” for example) and the mounting up of mysterious yet ominous occurrences, the 376 pages just disappear.
In the tradition of many fabulous storytellers, Coady intuits that, when it come to the reader’s breathless question, “What happens next?”, “In due time” is a perfectly alluring answer.