04 Feb 2013 10:41:25
The bovine local police are treating the missing children as runaways; Norman and his sleuthing press sidekick know better and, after a series of unlikely coincidences, they light upon the children's captor – Gabriel Merkin. Merkin is a serial killer in the Hannibal Lecter mode (although with none of Lecter's intelligence or soulfulness), released after a typical bit of police bungling. Now it only remains to see whether Norman and co can get to Merkin before he stuffs and mounts his victims.
This is the sixth novel that Torday has published since 2006's hugely successful Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. He is a former industry executive who, to quote his biography, "scaled back his business responsibilities" to concentrate on his writing. There is certainly something impressive about the volume coming off Torday's production line. The quality, to judge from Light Shining in the Forest at least, is more mixed. Putting aside the fact that we are supposed to quiver before a villain whose surname means – as any fule kno – a pubic wig, there are a number of areas where Torday's novel stumbles badly.
The first problem is with point of view. The book is told in the third person and each chapter is initially limited to the perspective of one or other of the main characters. Too often, however, Torday forgets himself and we are shunted jarringly into another's consciousness. Nothing whips the reader so swiftly from the narrative dream.
The next hitch is stylistic. To give us a flavour of Norman's worldview, the chapters from his perspective are told in pompous bureaucratese. This means that a good chunk of the book is rendered in sentences of near-unreadable ugliness. "There's no doubt it wouldn't have helped his career if people had thought he was still a religionist" struck me as particularly ungainly.
There is, throughout, the sense of a novelist with little regard for the intelligence of his readers. The book goes on much longer than it needs to because everything is repeated several times. A statement is made and then, just to make sure we've grasped the meaning, the characters ask near-identical rhetorical questions about it; we are given carbon-copy overviews of the journalist's upbringing, once on pages 46-47, once on page 184. Every five minutes (or so it seems) we are told that a child in the UK disappears every five minutes. Instead of allowing us to gumshoe our way through the clues, to make up our own minds about the characters, the author is there at every point, telling us what to think.
There are countless other problems with this book; with its blustering, Daily Express morality, its one-dimensional view of the poor, of the police, of politicians. There isn't room here to unpack the strange religious message scrambled into the text (we are asked to accept some very fishy divine intervention). The copious research the novelist has done on a range of subjects from forestry to embalming to taxidermy is unfurled at excessive length and with all the style and subtlety of a Haynes manual.
