Is this narrator crafty, or a dim bulb?

The Widow by Fiona Barton Penguin Random House

The Vancouver Sun book club is discussing Fiona Barton’s suspenseful novel The Widow. We will be holding an online, public chat with Barton on March 24, which will be a chance for readers to ask questions.

Melanie Jackson: Unreliable narrators are all the thing these days in mystery novels, e.g., Gone Girl, Girl On A Train, All the Missing Girls. Refreshingly, Jean Taylor is The Widow, not yet another girl. And I wouldn’t call her an unreliable narrator, either. She’s more of a drip-drip-drip one. She lets shocker revelations out almost casually, as when she’s deciding whether to accept money to do a newspaper interview. You, the reader, are stunned, puzzling over the unexpected info to try and figure out what it means. Quite a contrast to serene Jean, who becomes more and more unsettling.

Tracy Sherlock: For most of the novel, I thought Jean was a bit of a dim bulb. By the end, I was not so sure. What did others think?

Julia Denholm: Jean may be dim (and clearly dreadfully abused) but she is crafty. Trying not to do a spoiler here, but I knew what her crime was as soon as we learned what made her a widow (if that makes any sense). She holds out on the press until the value of her story is as high as possible, and when she sees an opportunity to be free, she takes it. And stays free. And makes money as a result. Crafty.

This is terrific characterization, and author Fiona Barton doesn’t confine her skill at it to the major characters.

Ian Weir: It’s interesting you should point to the fact Jean is “clearly dreadfully abused.” I mean, yes, that certainly does seem to be the case, when we meet her. But — since her husband is already dead as the story begins — there’s no sense of immediate jeopardy for her, either.

And this kind of goes to the heart of my difficulty. The crime in the novel is a horrific one — the apparent abduction (and murder?) of a child. But since the abduction took place a few years earlier, there’s not a sense of escalating mortal jeopardy for anyone else, either.

So either we find Jean so compelling as a character that we’re gripped by the mystery of whether she was in any way culpable — or else we find it all a bit abstract. And I confess that I tend to fall into the second category, despite my appreciation for various elements.