A local policeman takes her father’s service pistol off him and gives it to Eileen for safe keeping. Eileen has taken to keeping his shoes in the trunk of her car so that he will not wander out and terrorise the neighbours. Neither of them make any effort to keep the house clean or pay attention to what they eat. She lives with her father, a drunk and an ex-policeman who is a liability to his daughter and his neighbours. She has no friends, no interests except for her at-a-distance obsession with the guard Randy. (1)Īll readers know that appearances can deceive.Įileen works in an admin job in the local prison for young offenders. It’s easy for me to imagine this girl, a strange, young and mousy version of me, carrying an anonymous leather purse or eating from a small package of peanuts, rolling each one between her gloved fingers sucking in her cheeks, staring anxiously out of the window. You might take me for a nursing student or a typist, note the nervous hands, a foot tapping, bitten lip.
I looked like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus, reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography, perhaps wearing a net over my light brown hair. Eileen is introduced to us as a rather non-descript kind of young woman, with few memorable or redeeming features. The narrator is reflecting on events 50 years before. The story is located in coastal New England, near Boston, in 1964 at Christmas time. Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Observer and Daily Telegraph.Shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger Award 2016.Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2016.Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016.It’s a book that has done very well in the literary awards and accolades: And she lives in a town so dull that she calls it X-ville. She does not have much going in her favour in the novel: a dreary job, a dead mother, a drunken father. Although in her 20s the narrator, Eileen, appears to be obsessed in the ways that adolescents can be: bodily functions, secret passions, easily influenced, hard exterior. This is a dark book, not so much frightening as – well, dark.
0 kommentar(er)
