Reading The Booker Prize - Wild Houses
After a week of lots of reading, I've gone nearly two weeks without opening a book. That's the longest I've gone without reading anything in the past year, and I knew that if I didn't pick something up soon I might end up out of the habit and back into a reading slump. As it stands I feel like I've already forgotten how to blog about what I'm reading.
Before I stopped - and there was no reason for it, really, I just didn't have time to settle down with a book - I'd started Colin Barrett's Wild Houses and was enjoying it. When I picked it back up I initially thought that I was going to end up DNFing because I couldn't remember what was going on, but that turned out not to be the case. Within a page or two it all came back to me, and I'm very glad that it did.
I've read a few books this year that I'd call "literary crime" or "literary thrillers" and by and large I've really enjoyed them all. I'm starting to think that when I say I like crime novels this is the genre I'm looking for more often than not, books that have crime as a backdrop and play with the conventions and tone of thrillers but that are really much more about the internal lives of their characters than the plot itself.
Wild Houses centres around a kidnapping that's the result of a drug deal gone bad, putting us into the heads of people who are only tangentially connected to what's going on - the girlfriend of the boy who's been kidnapped (himself also collateral damage, as he's only taken in order for this captors to send a message to his brother, who is the person who owes them money) and the man whose house he's being held in. It's laced with tension and the constant threat of violence but it's actually a very tender, quiet novel. It's concerned with love, and loss, and family, and the claustrophobia of living in a small town where everyone knows your business. It's rooted in the land and the culture, and it's a joy to get to spend time with these characters even when they're going through it. It doesn't hurt that the writing is gorgeous, either.
I'm torn on whether to call this one of my favourites of the year or not, and I think the fact that I'm asking the question means that it isn't. But I did like it a lot, and I'm definitely going to seek out Barrett's short fiction and keep an eye out for whatever his next novel-length work happens to be.