Published by Headline, 29 August 2013.
ISBN: 978-0755378050
During the first few, very short chapters, I wasn’t at all sure I was
going to enjoy Tarnished. In the early stages the premise seemed
hackneyed: a protagonist desperate to know more about a childhood of which she
has only sparse, garbled memories; when she starts to explore them, they slowly
begin to make sense and form an unexpected picture which makes her doubt the
wisdom of doing so. What was more, the characters seemed a little dull: doting
grandmother with incipient Alzheimer’s, bedridden aunt, missing father and the
girl who moved away to embark on a drab career shelving books in a library.
But
I underestimated Julia Crouch; it creeps up on you and eventually holds you
enthralled. First of all, despite that unpromising start, I realized she had
held my attention well past the 50-page mark: always the first test. Then, as
she added layers to the characters, they began to vary between merely
interesting and positively grotesque. The grandmother is obsessively incapable
of throwing anything away – even used incontinence pads. The bedridden aunt,
whose disability is frequently mentioned but never explained in detail, is so
greedy and grossly obese that she needs a double-sized wheelchair on the one
occasion she leaves the house. The seedy father lives on the Costa del Crime
following a shady Soho past, and has a wife
straight out of the Ageing Stripper catalogue from Central Casting. And
protagonist Peg, the memory-exploring library assistant, turns out to be six
feet one, vegetarian and a happily partnered lesbian despite a stifling
upbringing which would have shoehorned a weaker personality into a far more
conventional mould. Even minor players like a nightclub cleaner and an elderly
ex-squaddie become slightly larger than life.
The
main setting of the novel, the Kent
coast around Whitstable, is almost a character in itself: the mud, the shingle,
the treacherous tides, form a monochrome background which counterpoints the
ever more colourful bits of Peg’s past which keep surfacing as she prods and
digs at the half-memories.
Towards
the end I had begun to twig, as Peg had, that the clues weren’t quite pointing
in the direction they appeared to – but that detracted not at all from the
shock of the big reveal when it finally came.
Tarnished is the kind of novel that leaves you feeling slightly
uncomfortable. Who knows what really goes on behind the net curtains of a
respectable bungalow? And are we better off not knowing? Think grubbier version
of Sophie Hannah, with a touch of Martina Cole as seasoning.
------
Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
Julia Crouch grew
up in Cambridge and studied Drama at Bristol University. She spent ten years working
as a theatre director and playwright, then, after a spell of teaching, she
somehow became a successful graphic and website designer, a career she followed
for another decade while raising her three children. An MA in sequential
illustration reawoke her love of narrative and a couple of Open University
creative writing courses brought it to the fore. Cuckoo,
her first novel, emerged as a very rough draft during NaNoWriMo (National Novel
Writing Month) in 2008. A year's editing got it ready for submission to an
agent and within a couple of months she had a book deal with Headline and had
given up the day job. Every Vow You Break, her second
novel, was published in March 2012, and Tarnished,
her third, came out in 2013. She is also published in Italy, France,
Germany, Holland,
Brazil and China. She
works in a shed at the bottom of the Brighton
house she shares with her husband, the actor and playwright Tim Crouch.
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with
books, about half of them crime fiction.
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