THE LONG WATER: REVIEW

 

The tension builds to the climax of the novel, creating an entirely satisfying read that will stay with the reader long after any mysteries have been solved. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)

Stef Penney has many strengths as a novelist, and one of the greatest – fully on display here – is her ability to gradually build a totally convincing setting, peopled by rounded, believable and fascinating characters.

She does it whether she is giving her fiction an historical setting, or placing it in the present day as she does in The Long Water.

 Here we are in Nordland, a remote area of north Norway, in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. One evening, close to the final exams at the high school when all the pupils are letting their hair down before getting stuck into their last academic hurdle, four senior boys go up into the mountains for some fun, but only three return. Daniel has gone missing. His companions say he wanted to climb further, and went on alone. But he has seemingly vanished into thin air.

Are his friends covering for him? Did something awful happen? If anyone knows, they aren’t saying, and the community is devastated. Telling the story, Penney concentrates on her main characters, particularly elderly, grumpy Svea whose ties to the area are long and deep, but who also has a complicated and interesting past. She has few friends, but one, Odd Emil, is the grandfather of the missing boy. And she is also close to her granddaughter, the misfit Elin, who, like Daniel, is a pupil at the local school. Elin’s only close friend is the gay Benny. And all of them have issues or memories they would rather remained hidden.

Then the police, scouring the area, find a body in a disused mine. But this one has been there for a very long time, and is not easy to identify. As well as the current alarm, old scandals and dramas begin to come to the surface.

It almost feels dismissive to pigeonhole this book as a “crime novel”, or part of the Scandi noir genre, because it is much more than that: not something that should be slotted easily into a category. It is an exploration of a remote, closed society in turmoil and the effects – good and bad - on the people who are part of it. It also considers how everyone’s present is informed by their past. The tension builds to the climax of the novel, creating an entirely satisfying read that will stay with the reader long after any mysteries have been solved. - Margaret von Klemperer

The Long Water is published by Quercus: ISBN 978-1-52942-568-0