Thriller set mainly in New York (family dynamics…)

14th January 2017

Gilding the Lily by Justine John, thriller set mainly in New York.

Amelia’s father Roger is due to turn 75 and his current lady-friend, Evelyn, has arranged a surprise dinner party in the glittering and rather brash Russian Nightclub ‘Babushka’, located in the “faded and used up” resort of Coney Island (as Roger himself described the place). Amelia, based in Wimbledon UK is only too aware that this party is poorly thought through, the locale would be an anathema to her father, and, more to the point, he utterly dislikes surprises. Nevertheless Amelia, in the company of her husband ex-cop Jack, flies out to New York with a deep sense of foreboding, both about the party and about having to work on her tricky relationship with Evelyn.

Fragrant Evelyn is not all she seems to be and the veneer of devoted partner soon develops seismic cracks, but surely her scornful and cutting remarks and actions are misunderstandings? Even when Evelyn lunges for Jack in an attempt to throttle him, Amelia and Jack are still determined to pursue a relationship for the sake of her father. But with each day, it seems, Evelyn is intent on driving a substantial wedge between father and daughter. The physical distance, once they are back in England, only serves to fire the breach in relations. These are very unhappy family dynamics.

As Roger’s health starts to fail and the couple is kept at arm’s length by Evelyn, Jack trawls his memory and comes to an ominous conclusion, based on a case in his past life in the police force. It is too terrible to contemplate, and yet….. driven by his suspicions, the two journey back to New York to try and get to the bottom of what is really going on. What lies behind Roger’s rapid demise? He is clearly very ill. It dawns on them that Evelyn does afterall have a history of outliving past relationships…. Where can it possibly end? No spoiler that lilies of the valley feature somewhere along the line, as they adorn the cover!

The chapters in the book are fairly short, each titled with one of the characters, mainly ‘Jack’ and ‘Amelia’. Occasionally ‘Evelyn’ talks to the proverbial camera and it is through her musings that the reader comes to understand a little more about what her drives might be. The chapters flip between first and third person at random and this undermines the sharp pace that is beginning to build – if a chapter has a character in the heading I would anticipate the narrative would largely be from that character’s perspective or at least full focus would be on that character. Not necessarily so in this book, however. It feels muddled.

The author clearly has a talent for writing, I really did want to know where the story would go. The characters, though, drifted across the pages and for me weren’t sufficiently fleshed out to be able to connect with them.

Overall, I felt that an eagle-eyed editor would be able to coax the storyline, which at times felt like an unruly puppy, into a sleek and seamless narrative with a good focus. The use of editorial services would also be a chance to remove the typos and grammatical errors, and hone some of the writing. Descriptions, such as that of a check-in queue at JFK,  ultimately felt like unnecessary padding, the purpose unclear: “I spotted a pair of erstwhile Hasidic Jews, business people, Chinese, African, smart, casual, lazy-looking, happy, fat, thin, hurried, laid back. I saw light hair, dark hair, greasy hair, bald heads, head-scarves, black jacket, no jacket, ties, t-shirts…  To me that sounded like an average day at any airport the world over and added nothing to my experience of reading the book (and probably detracted if I am honest).

All in all Gilding The Lily is an ok reading experience in the form in which it is presented at the moment.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

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