Book Review: The Widow

Gone Girl, Broken Harbour, The Girl on the Train, Black Widow, and countless other novels anatomising a dysfunctional marriage later, we now have Fiona Barton's The Widow. What also ties them together is the very aspect of looking at crimes from different angles as the timelines shift back and forth, while ferreting out the psyches of the characters involved, before all is revealed in a gasp-inducing climax. Or is it?

The Widow

Gone Girl and Broken Harbour were shocking and splendid, not because of the twists in themselves, but for the complex psychological narratives that also served as cautionary social commentaries, inviting the readers to take a real look at their relationships, and realise what it takes to tear apart their picture-perfect facades and reveal their true colours to each other. That both these novels unfolded in the aftermath of U.S. and Irish recession respectively only added to the emotional heft of the stories.

The Girl on the Train, on the other hand, relied on an unreliable narrator to propel its story forward, that of an alcoholic woman's obsession with a missing woman that bordered on voyeurism. Fiona Barton, like Chris Brookmyre in Black Widow, takes it one step further in her debut psychological thriller by making one of the key characters a journalist, the ultimate voyeur. To be fair, The Widow has its moments. And the premise is interesting enough, a no easy feat, given that both the crime and the man suspected of perpetrating it are revealed too early, leaving Jean Taylor, his wife-turned-widow, Kate Waters, the reporter, Bob Sparkes, the detective, and a clutch of other narrators to fill the gaps and inform the reader of what actually happened.

Taken in that sense, The Widow is perhaps more of a psychological howdunit than a whodunit. It revolves around Jean, the wife of Glen Taylor, the man accused of abducting a two-year-old girl Bella Elliott. He outright denies any wrongdoing, says the cops are barking up the wrong tree, but soon as evidence of his disturbing sexual predilections surface, Jean, while playing the part of "the wonderful wife who stood by her husband", struggles as to how much she actually knows about the man whom she's been married to for a good 18 years.

Had Glen lived, "the dark spaces" that existed between them would've easily slipped into the inevitable Gone Girl territory, but Barton does the unthinkable by killing the kinky husband in a road mishap. Which means Jean, the eponymous widow, can thankfully do away with the pretense of being the perfect wife. As a thriller, The Widow is eminently readable in one sitting, its journalistic perspectives often interesting, but the story on the whole feels lacking, both as a character study and a dissection of a failing marriage. Furthermore, Jean's characterisation isn't compelling enough; she comes across as dull, incredibly naive and someone who is older than what she is made out to be, which perhaps is intentional, but sucks the life out of the novel.