#3 Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

   I wasn't expecting to like 'Gone Girl', as read from the description the basic premise didn't really appeal:

 'What are you thinking, Amy?' The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: 'What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?' Just how well can you ever know the person you love? This is the question that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary when his wife Amy suddenly disappears..

I'm not really a fan of that sort of thriller-esque beautiful woman goes missing why did she do it thing.  The orange on black cover sort of confirmed the impression of a  'dramatic' novel for the mass market.  Not to mention the title - 'Gone Girl', why 'girl' why not woman except that girl a) alliterates - making it easier to remember and rhetorically more appealing, and b) what, it sounds more mysterious/flighty? A 'girl' applied to a grown woman already makes her sound more dramatic, someone whose eyes probably 'sparkle mischievously' every now and then, it implies lack of responsibility.  All in all a total turn off.  But for a project I had to read 'Gone Girl' and I'm thoroughly glad I did.

   Flynn has managed to create a relationship between Nick and Amy that is unmistakably grim, human and true.  I'll hope other people read it quietly nodding along to the way two people who love each other can still just not understand one another, and how things unsaid build up and become huge silent elephants.  The grim but inevitable realization that the other person isn't perfect and will never understand you as much as you'd want, not even close.  Whilst these things are easy to lay out clinically the treatment Flynn gives them brings the issues to shocking life in front of your eyes.  Genuine human relationships are rarely found anywhere in literature - or much art, but this is brutally insightful.  The twisted conclusion it comes to is more worrying - and the point when (luckily) I felt the head nodding come to a stop.

   Whilst this is a thriller in the truest sense there are no jumps, no killers in the back seat, yet it isn't totally a psychological kicker either.  The thrill lies in the pitch perfect depiction of what could just happen when someone crosses a line.  It touches on one of my favorite motifs of literature - the unreliable narrator, the blunt realization that we, the reader, are being lied to.

   All in all a brilliant bit of fiction, perhaps the ending maybe felt a little too stretched, the conclusions a little too contrived but never to the point of anything less than total fascination.

Characters: 9/10 full and complete and mental
Police procedure: 8/10 we get to watch them swing back and forth with genuine interest
Narrator Reliability: 2/10 Brilliant!
Totally: 8/10