(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
Books that subvert expectations are quite possibly the very best kind.
When you first pick up The Dead Friend Project by Joanna Wallace, you might be struck by the quirkiness of the titlenand even the taglines on the front cover and atop the back cover blurb which suggest a murder mystery with as much idiosyncrasy as there is darkness of the human soul.
Even the aforementioned back cover blurb has some fun with the premise, suggesting an intriguing mystery that must be solved if the protagonist, a swearing-inclined single mother named Beth, is to get any peace but one that can only be solved once the kids are in bed and a glass of wine is securely and confrotably in hand.
But as you dive into the gloriously well written depths of The Dead Friend Project, which is as much an archly observed critique of the hypocrisy of modern suburban life as it is a fiesta of deeply unsettling and somewhat invasive sleuthing, it becomes apparent that while the quirk and rich humour is most definitely present and accounted for, that so is the kind of darkness that is only in evidence when the very worst on humanity is on display.
As the novel opens, Beth is not in a good place.
Oh, she talks a brave, very sweary game in the school playground where everyone and everything is given a withering stare and a torrent of dismissive dialogue, but Beth’s husband has left her, her best friend died a year earlier leaving her mired in a quagmore of grief and she is struggling to find a healthy way to cope with a whole lot of corrosive terrible emotions.
‘I don’t think you went out for a run that night, Charlotte, and if there’s doubt, check it out. I’m [Beth] going to find out what happened to you.’
In other words, she is ridiculously and brilliantly relatable.
If you have ever had the misfortune to have to cope, with almost no notice – Beth’s husband leaves her and her friend dies in what police have deemed an accident – with a towerin tsumani of happiness obliterating grief, you will be well acquainted, more’s the pity, with how hard it is to pull yourself out from under it.
As The Dead Friend Project opens, you get the impression that Beth is good, her sass and friendly, if acid-tinged banter, suggesting someone bouncing over the trip of all the bleakness with a glibly energetic alacrity.
But, of course, Beth is not doing anything of the sort, appearances aside, and as she begins to suspect on the anniversary of Charlotte’s death that it was not an accident at all, she begins a slow but steady spiral to some very dark and tragic places indeed.
This is not a novel where the human condition gets off scot-free.
In fact, for much of its length, the quirky comedy which you expect will dominate is held in adroit tension with a murder mystery which no one but Beth wants to indulge because they all just want to move on and all Beth is doing, so they think, is sustaining a line of enquiry that will go nowhere good.
(courtesy Curtis Brown)
But it’s that dance between leaving something alone because everyone but Beth thinks it will be easier, and the need to know who took away her most treasured and beautiful of friends that powers the compellingly readable storyline of The Dead Friend Project.
It is in many ways a deep, dark exploration of the dark places the human soul can go to, not simply when it commits murder but in the aftermath of the catastrophic sadness that enmeshes those caught up in an event that is far more deadly than simply the initial loss of life.
Beth isn’t handling life well and while investigating what she suspects is Charlotte’s murder doesn’t necessarily cause her to plunge into some ruinousl addictive places, it doesn’t help her to recover from her mountainous pile of grief either, often exacerbating some exhaustingly dark dynamics already playing havoc in Beth’s barely held together life.
The brilliance of Wallace’s writing is that she manages to keep the intrigue and the “what-ifs” percolating along consistently and compellingly while keeping the focus very much on why this matters so much to Beth.
She has lost so much, and while she still has three kids, and a slew of friendships that turn out to be deep, more substantial and enduring that she even remotely suspects, Beth needs to get to the bottom of Charlotte’s death if she is to have any peace going forward.
‘Beth,’ he says, turning back to face me. ‘ Do you honestly not remember?’
Deep diving into who might have killed Charlotte and why gives Beth back some sense of purpose, something shorn off her by the events of twelve months previously.
While she remains a devoted if beleaguered mum, she feels otherwise adrift and lost, and while everyone around her is convinced she needs to let her mission to get justice for Charlotte go, Beth simply can’t do that even if it starts to place under the kind of further strain with which she doesn’t cope at all.
A stellar mystery of the most intruguing proportions, The Dead Friend Project absolutely delivers as a crime novel that dives into the very darkest places of the human experience while seeking justice for the perceived wrongs committed.
But it is also a moving and darkly funny novel that goes to the heart of not only why someone might something so evil to Charlotte, a sweet lovely super mum who could do no wrong in Beth’s eyes, but how the death of someone in such traumatic circumstances can have devastating ripple events well beyond the initial event.
Most of all though, The Dead Friend Project is an immersively compelling, humour-tinged exploration of the human condition, both the darkness and the light, and how we can all stumble and fall when life becomes too much and we are unable to pull ourselves out from under a mountain of loss and grief.
Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is how you manage such a feat and emerge on the other side although as the magnetically brillian ending of The Dead Friend Project makes breathtakingly clear, even that may not be as straightforward as might like.