| Review: Sarah Dunant, MAPPING THE EDGE |
| Mapping The Edge starts
promisingly enough, and its back cover suggests a psychological thriller
that redefines the boundaries of the genre, a book that departs from
the usual thriller formula, a book full of surprises. Generally, redefining boundaries translates, at least for me, to something more inclusive, something that transcends the cliché. I’m not crazy about thrillers, but I like books that stretch edges and manage to surprise me. So I was hopeful. Plus, Dunant’s books are well-read. Unfortunately, my hope began to fade early on. A woman goes off for a weekend and does not return as expected. The story of the woman follows two possible tracks—one, an abduction; and two, a romantic get-away. Then there is the mini-drama of those waiting and wondering at home. I kept waiting for the story to swell, to draw me in, but it would not. The characters are well-enough evoked to engage, and the writing is strong enough to trust, but the device of the two possible situations is used in such a narrow, unimaginative way that I rapidly lost interest in this, the core drama of the book, and found myself concentrating instead on the mini-drama at home. At least here there was depth of experience and feeling, a little of the unexpected. To my mind, a suspense, even one that “transcends’ its own boundaries should be a good ride. It should be smart and layered and deceitful. Keep you in the dark until there are very few pages still to turn. But Mapping The Edge is more like an exercise. It plods, it’s too aware of its tricky structure, and it takes nothing that even remotely resembles a risk. Dunant writes characters well. And she writes relationships well, with a potential for discovery. But because the book depends so much on the mystery of ‘what’s happened to Anna?’ and on matching the details of the two diverse experiences (telegraphing the fact that Anna will eventually return), the potential richness of engagement with the characters is thwarted. There is no discovery, no real suspense, no chilling descent into the id. Not even a little tongue-in-cheek by the author to show us that she doesn’t really take this ‘psychological thriller stuff’ seriously, that, after all, it’s just an enjoyably tense way of passing a couple of hours. I’ll remember the characters in Mapping The Edge for a while. They were that well drawn. But I won’t remember what happened to them. Because it didn’t really happen. It was just a book. And it never let me forget that.
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