Into the Water – Paula Hawkins

I will just come right out and say this – this is a huge pain in the ass to read. This was so bad I could not finish. I was in a cafe and hit the halfway mark. I lifted my lethargic head up from the pages and asked my wifey (who had finished it earlier) “please tell me this gets better and the characters climb up from the lake of utter despair”. She replied no. I proceeded to roll my eyes and prayed for mercy…

In the last days before her death, Nel called her sister. Jules didn’t pick up the phone, ignoring her plea for help.

Now Nel is dead. They say she jumped. And Jules has been dragged back to the one place she hoped she had escaped for good, to care for the teenage girl her sister left behind.

But Jules is afraid. So afraid. Of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of knowing that Nel would never have jumped.

And most of all she’s afraid of the water, and the place they call the Drowning Pool . . .

I belonged to the minority that didn’t think Paula Hawkin’s The Girl on the Train was a stunning debut. There were some good moments and the Rashomon-esque narrative trick was well employed, but the characters are unsympathetic and unreliable. For her sophomore effort, Hawkins dips into the same old bag of tricks, but this time she totally over-plays her hand with the narrative told from different perspectives. Whereas The Girl on the Train only had four perspectives, Into the Water has what feels like tripled that! That is tripled the number of unlikable characters wallowing in self-pity. The characters’ emotional states swing from indifference to anger to the maudlin. The timelines switches from the past and present like a faulty light switch, which makes for a disembodied read. Even the central mystery fails to make the read compelling. At times the words floated into space and disintegrate into letters, milling around my dazed consciousness. It was sheer torture.

But mercy came… I requested my wifey to tell me how it ends and she wisely advised me to just read the last chapter. She said nothing happens in the rest of the chapters. So, on that fateful day, in a quaint looking cafe located next to an underused airport, I finished the last chapter, lifted my befuddled face and uttered “WTF”. There is no OMG moment and the revelation feels totally flawed and illogical, which I won’t reveal here, unless you are praying for mercy.