Well, it’s been a couple weeks since I finished this, so I’m trying to recall. I know it was a pretty quick read. It has all the standard characters. I can even now imagine the scenes, so it’s stuck with me. I wouldn’t rate it one of her best. In fact, in discussion with another Cornwell reader, he said he has the impression she calls it in now. I would tend to agree.
**spoiler alert**
Australian Commonwealth House of Reps results – 2013
HouseSeatSummaryDownload-17496
The link above is to a file that shows the electorate margins for all seats in the Federal House of Representatives from the 2013 election. It was saved from the Australian Electoral Commission website. The only manipulation I have done is to sort the chart so that the margins appear from smallest to largest.
This file is saved in .csv format. Feel free to download a copy and sort in any way you wish to answer your own questions.
Gillian Flynn’s book, Gone Girl, is one of those books you can’t put down. In Australia we would call it ‘moreish’. (Not sure if that’s spelled right, but you get what I mean.) It started out as something I would read before going to sleep at night. But then I got sucked in. Finished in a marathon read yesterday, between the coffee shop and later at home.
I have a friend who is a psychologist who had seen the film, but not read the book. Me vice versa. We started discussing the book on Sunday on the way to a Christmas break-up party, me reacting to unreliable narrator Nick (I seem to be getting a lot of those lately), and poor missing wife Amy writing in her diary. Maureen was doing her best not to give away the oft-identified ‘twist’. We left it at that because she couldn’t talk much about it without spilling the beans. I went home after the party and picked up the book again.
OMG! (I wrote in an email to Maureen) — blah blah (spoiler)! Over the next day, I sent her a few more OMG! emails, to which she told me she laughed each time. Then last night, I sent a final email with this: the ending was unsatisfying. And this: “It did keep me reading. It wasn’t putdownable. But is that really enough? I don’t think it is.”
I don’t intend to put anything about the plot here because if you haven’t read it or seen the movie, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But the question I ask myself as a reader and a writer is: if you give the reader a good ride, but you don’t end with something of equal quality, have you done your job?
I like the way this book is written. Amy is introduced through her diary. I’m using diary entries in my current work in progress. Shawna is writing in the journal Max gave her (from On A Life’s Edge). I like diaries. They are (usually) a way to get into the honest, bare, private thoughts of the character. So I liked to see the technique used in Gone Girl. She also uses what I call ‘zebra POV’, changing the POV character at each chapter, both in first person, the story told by both Nick and Amy. I think that keeps things neat and easily followed by the reader and is also a technique I used in OALE. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with the sequel, but I do think it worked in my first book and in GG.
GG’s chapters end with pull-through situations or lines, which is one of the reasons I kept reading, couldn’t put it down. I also love the natural dialog in GG. For those of you who know the characters and the twist, I hope you agree. Probably a bit too literally real for some purists — too many ums, ahs, etc. But I think the characterisation is excellent. There was also just enough narrative description to keep things moving and yet give a sense of place. I guess I’d sum this up by saying the necessary ‘cues’ were all there.
This book moves right along because of all these literary techniques. I think they are done well. I just wish she had come up with a different ending. So in that aspect, she hasn’t done her job well enough for me.
Rating: 3.5 stars. Maybe a good beach read.
I liked it. As a reader, the story is pure fun. As a writer, it is a lesson in foreshadowing, the unreliable narrator, and using the fantastical to keep a reader guessing what bizarreness will come next. Even the title begs this book to be read, just to find out what an ‘illywhacker’ is. (He does define it and the story is about that.)
Carey published Illywhacker in 1985, an award winner, a book you can get your teeth into, with multiple layers of study of the human condition. It is an illustration of crazy Australiana – regional towns, major cities, country folk, working with what is at hand and things they can make. The characters are wonderfully crafted so that by the end, you will know Leah, George, Mr. Lo, and Emma who lives in a cage. Herbert Badgery tells us, from his point of view, who these people are and were to him, as they changed, as their relationships developed and sometimes withered away, some surviving for his entire life, if we can believe him. He was a car salesman after all.
This story is about cages – metaphorical and actual, the ones we choose, the ones we don’t, and the ones we don’t realise we are in. This book is just as relevant today, to think about, as it was thirty years ago.
Highly recommend.