Kev Ryan31 August 2012
'Gone Girl' is a New York Times No.1 bestseller and the third novel from Gillian Flynn.
The tale of Nick and Amy Dunne, a late 30's couple living in the town of North Carthage, Missouri, it begins in July 2012 on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, when Nick returns home to find the front door open, furniture overturned and his wife missing. We follow attempts to discover what has happened from Nick's point of view and watch as his evasiveness, inappropriate behaviour and at times lies quickly lead the police and media to point the finger at him. Intercut with the present day chapters are entries from Amy's diary for the previous seven years detailing the history of their relationship from first meeting to just days before her disappearance. She paints a picture of a golden couple living a glamorous New York life, him a handsome, laid-back charmer her a smart, beautiful, perfectionist. Slowly though, the forced perkiness and small inconsistencies of her story start to seem a little off and the suspicion grows that Amy might be as unreliable and manipulative a narrator as Nick.
Flynn was a film and tv journalist for 10 years, and the pacy prose and short chapters are packed with clever pop culture and film noir references and some particularly sharp analysis of the 24-hour news cycle and the true-crime media circus that quickly forms around Nick. What starts as a smart, often darkly comic, mystery about a woman's disappearance steadily morphs into a tense psychological profile of a toxic marriage that asks the question 'How well can you ever know the person you love?'. A tense, twisted thriller that at times has touches of horror like a blend of Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock.
Pervading everything is the theme of endings and deaths. Nick and Amy both lost their journalism jobs in the dying print industry thanks to the internet. They lost their lifestyle when Amy's trust fund disappeared in the economic downturn. They relocated to Nick's hometown to be with his mother who is dying of cancer and his estranged father drifting into dementia. And the setting of North Carthage is a portrait of a decaying town where laid-off factory workers roam the streets in lawless packs and sleep out at the abandoned shopping mall. Everywhere dreams, relationships and lives seem to be imploding.
The novel's first third is ingeniously plotted and breathtakingly tense and it is perhaps too much to expect that pace to be kept up for the full 400 pages. A plot turn at halfway starts to let the air out of proceedings and while the ending makes sense in an inevitable film-noir way it may not deliver the satisfying/disturbing emotional punch the author intended. Still these are small criticisms. 'Gone Girl' is a tense and beautifully written story with horrifyingly believable characters and a dark, toxic heart. For many it will be the best thriller they read all year.
