Crime Beat

One of the books on my want-to-read list is Life after Life (Secker&Warburg) by the late Tony Parker in which he interviews twelve murderers. Mike Nicol describes it as one of his all-time favourites from a journalistic point of view. Among those Parker interviews is a man who has been jailed for the motiveless murder of a fellow lodger in his boarding house, a story which triggered M J Hyland’s riveting third novel, This is How (Canongate). It’s one of my best reads of the year. For other good krimi-reads pop back to Crime Beat tomorrow for a list of the crime novels that kept our crime writers glued to the pages long into the dark hours.

Hyland is knee-deep in prizes, including a Booker nomination, but I’d never heard of her before reading this book. A major oversight. I was hooked from the opening pages, even though Hyland’s hero is hardly charismatic. He’s twenty three years old, so chronically ill-at-ease and unsure of himself that it’s almost sinister. One feels he must be hiding something as the ordinariness of his life unfolds. He takes a room as a lodger in a boarding house in the seaside English town where he’s found a new job, hoping for a fresh start away from home. His fiancée has just broken up with him because he can’t express his emotions. He claims he doesn’t have many emotions but there’s an understated thread of violence and a sexual sub-text that again feels sinister. But I was as surprised as he seems to be by the crime that he’s jailed for. He’s outraged, even though both he and the reader know he’s guilty.

The second half of the novel is set in prison and I’m shocked by his experience. Somehow, I expected an English jail to be superior to a South African one. Like an English washing machine. It’s a mind-set which seems to have little justification. The bureaucratic wheels turn just as slowly and latent violence and sexual undercurrents among the inmates seemed as real as when I worked with prisoners at Pollsmoor.

It’s a measure of Hyland’s skill that the reader feels so protective about such an unsympathetic hero. It’s a claustrophobic story written in fine, spare prose which gives a fascinating insight into circumstances in which a sane, reasonable man might commit a disproportionately serious crime. He finds both support and judgment from the people in his thinly populated world and it’s interesting how the narrowness of the prison and its inmates starts, in a complicated way, to offer more security than the freedom of the outside world.

I’ve since read Hyland’s first novel, How the light gets in but I can’t spin it as a crime novel, even though the heroine steals. I believe her when she says she was only borrowing it. I think that’s why both books succeed. The characters are absolutely credible. Hyland’s reviews and website www.mjhyland.com suggest that she knows a lot about being an outsider, despite the high profile she’s achieved.