An unreliable narrator keeps her husband and readers guessing; the welcome return of burned-out cop Jake Jackson; a multilayered family thriller; and a disturbing boarding school secret
We don’t learn the name of the protagonist of Scarlett Thomas’s gloriously dark and tangled thriller, The Sleepwalkers (Scribner), for some time, but it’s immediately clear that we are in the hands of that most joyous device, an unreliable narrator, and that she’s out to justify something bad that’s happened. She’s writing a letter to her husband, Richard, to explain why she has left him behind on the Greek island where they’ve come for their honeymoon. Their love, she says, is “forever cursed”; there is another woman involved, Isabella (“I find it so hard to write her name”). We learn of some former guests at the hotel where they’re staying, a couple known as “the sleepwalkers”, who walked into the sea and drowned. Our narrator is prone to the dramatic – looking at a painting of some tulips, she says “the red flowers looked like large wine glasses full of blood, or – and I have no idea why I thought this – stuffed with meat”.
She’s hard to trust: “From now on, everything I say I will imagine you disagreeing with, saying ‘It wasn’t like that’ or ‘You’re not being fair.’” Thomas, author of the acclaimed The End of Mr Y, tells her story through fragments of letters, torn notebook pages and audio transcripts; it’s a lot of fun trying to work out the truth of what’s happened, and I’m not sure I ever really got there, but that didn’t remotely affect my enjoyment of this clever thriller. As one character later says, critiquing one version of the story (because there are many), it’s “too experimental and too dark. They said they still didn’t know who the sleepwalkers really were and who, if anyone, had killed them.” This isn’t too experimental, it’s just dark enough, and I highly recommend it.
