A review that originally appeared in Black Static #82/83:-
Nina Allan’s work has appeared in five issues of Black Static and Spin was TTA Novella #2. Allan’s latest novel is THE GOOD NEIGHBOURS (riverrun pb, 304pp, £9.99). Like Carole Johnstone’s The Blackhouse it has a female protagonist returning to an isolated Scottish island to investigate a past crime. After taking pictures of a house in which a murder was committed, Cath decides that a book of such photos might be a worthwhile project for her to undertake. She takes a leave of absence from her job at a record shop and heads for the Isle of Bute, where she lived as a teenager. Her intention is to confront unresolved issues from her past by photographing the house in which her best friend Shirley Craigie, along with her mother and three year old brother, were shot dead, supposedly by father John who died in a car crash almost immediately after. The murder house is currently occupied by Alice, a financial analyst seeking a break from her stressful life and partner Saheed, and the two quickly become friends. As Cath digs deeper she begins to create a picture in her mind of what took place and the character of John Craigie, who she is fascinated to learn was a believer in fairies, the good neighbours of the title.
There are three strands here. In the foreground we have Cath’s emotional state, in which she comes to terms with the events in her past and her sexuality. She constantly talks to Shirley in her head, and the suggestion is that in some way she was in love with her friend, even while admitting that at the time of Shirley’s murder the two were drifting apart. Concurrent with that we have her feelings for Alice, who is unable to be anything more than a friend and the difficulties Cath has in accepting that situation, her dreams of them having a future together running aground on the cold, hard reality of Saheed’s presence in Alice’s life. There’s also her relationship with various men, including the married boyfriend Adam, who is both needy and manipulative, constantly belittling her, and on the other hand record shop owner Steve who is her best friend, as dependent on her support as she is on him for a job that allows her to pursue creative endeavours. Throughout she struggles to attain an emotional equilibrium.
Then there is the strand in which Cath with Alice and/or her partner Saheed investigate the murder of Shirley and her family, piecing together events from the past and discovering possibilities missed by the police at the time. This is meticulously plotted, with each event following on naturally from the previous, Cath talking to old friends of the family and visiting sites that were important at the time, slowly and painstakingly piecing it all together with an aplomb that suggests Allan might have a solid future as a thriller writer if she ever decides to take that direction in her writing career. Despite all that though there is no real sense of closure for the reader at the end. We know who really killed the Craigie family, even if the evidence isn’t fully conclusive, but in part it all hinges on a huge coincidence.
And then there is the most fascinating aspect of the book, the whole thing with the good neighbours or fairies, in which Allan gives us a wealth of folklore, research into the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, events seen through the eyes of John Craigie in which he has various encounters with the fairies, and a fake wiki entry on philosopher and linguist Mabel Konig and her theories (this book’s equivalent of Donnie Darko character Rose Sparrow). It’s intriguing stuff and fires the reader’s imagination. Unless I’ve missed something, the problem is that at the end, as Cath herself admits, it is just a red herring; the fairy stuff doesn’t expand directly on the story in the way that, say, doll lore contributed to the appeal and success of Allan’s previous novel The Dollmaker (highly recommended, incidentally). While The Good Neighbours is eminently readable and engrossing, the book as a whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.
Trumpetville 