Twisting reading: "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn

Dear reader, surely you have read Gone Girl? Everyone else has, it seems, which makes writing this small review largely redundant except as record keeping. But maybe there is someone still out there unaware of this publishing phenomenon, which pops up in all sorts of "best books of 2012" lists (admittedly sometimes in the crime/mystery/thriller category). Assuming there is such a person, I will endeavour not to spoil, though to talk about this book without talking about the twists and surprises it delivers is not an easy task.


Gone Girl is related alternately by the two halves of a married couple, Nick and Amy. They are five years into their marriage. They met when he was writing for a New York magazine, and she was a glamorous trust fund girl. They were the perfect beautiful young couple, set up by her parents in a charming Brooklyn brownstone, brought with the proceeds of their publishing enterprise, itself based on a series of children's books about "Amazing Amy" a kind of alter ego of their own daughter. The perfection, we discover, did not last: Nick has lost his job, as the internet decimates print journalism, and Amy's parents have hit hard times, and are obliged to borrow back their daughter's trust fund. The couple have moved back to Nick's hometown, in deepest provincial Wisconsin, an environment conducive perhaps to Nick, but utterly alien to urban sophisticate Amy. 

Nick's early accounts focus on Amy's discontent, her friendless dissatisfaction, her low level hostility to the husband who imposed the provincial life on her. Hers are diary entries, relating the early years together, and expressing wifely concern over her husband's dark moods, even to the extent that she feels the need, purely as a precaution, to purchase a gun - just in case things get out of hand.

On the day of this troubled couple's fifth anniversary, Amy goes missing. There are signs of a struggle in their house and, of course, knowing that nine times out of ten, it's the husband wot dunnit, suspicion starts to focus on the strangely detached Nick. And there it stays, fed by a drip drip of revelation. 

Right, no spoiling. You can see what happens next...

If, of course, this book is worth reading... My answer is a definite yes. This novel is perhaps not a literary work with the psychological depth of, say, a Freedom, but it is sophisticated and insightful, albeit perhaps a little extreme to be 100% credible as an analysis of marital dysfunction anyone else would recognise. But its secret lies in Flynn's brilliant handling of her two deeply unreliable narrators, and the astounding plot twists she delivers with exceptional skill via their contrasting but converging accounts. This is a page-turner - it has to have been to generate the mega-sales it has enjoyed - but one relying on psychological intricacies and narrative verve which place it several cuts above the average thriller. 

Read it, enjoy it, read it again and talk about it (my edition, somewhat disconcertingly, even included "book club reading notes" at the end). Whatever, recommended.