Two children got on an underground train in London. Only one got off.
The search for the missing child is the narrative of Andrea Mara's 2023 novel No One Saw A Thing. I was looking forward to it because I enjoyed the TV adaptation of her earlier novel All Her Fault. I decided to read it partly because that was an attractive and well played story but also because I wanted to make comparisons between book and movie (or at least the eight part series).
I've generally been of the view that books are more satisfying than TV because the nuances of human thought and feeling are too subtle to show eloquently on the screen. Now I'm not so sure.
Mara clearly has a talent for devising clever plots and constructing back stories for the multiple characters, all of whom know (or have known) each other well in her books. The central fiction of a child going missing, in both books, feels personal; I don't know whether Mara's own story bears on this but that, plus a focus on sympathetic female and untrustworthy male characters seems intimate.
Everyone lies
That utterance by one of the characters lies at the core of the book and is borne out eventually; even those it's easy to warm to prove it. Perhaps that's true of much crime fiction but it's tiring. If you know they're all lying, why bother to try to read and consider everything they say? You know it's all going to come out in the wash. If every character is flawed, there is no jeopardy, no empathy. You can't risk getting attached because you will end up disappointed. It's fair to say, though, that there are no story lines which are incongruous or irrational; human nature makes them credible.
My main problem with this book is the way that the lies emerge through flashbacks. Multiple times you're just getting into the narrative and ... it's interrupted by a flashback chapter. I was annoyed by it and wanted to know if there could have been a better way. I get that the back stories have to emerge gradually during the plot but the sudden back and forth time lines felt jarring. I tried to recall how it was handled in the TV series of the earlier book; there were certainly lots of them and they were differentiated by the flashbacks being in monochrome. I don't remember being irritated by them; perhaps the slow pace of weekly episodes is better suited to that style.
I wasn't happy with the writing style. I'm not a student of literature but the conversations between the decades long friends were for me bland and trivial. I found that the excellent acting in All Her Fault meant I could relate to what the protagonists were feeling; in prose those feelings have to be expressed in a string of words. And the plot similarities between the two books made it seem somewhat formulaic.
I'm being over-harsh here. My personal tastes are not everyone's and my preference for character development over convoluted plots not what others ask from a thriller/mystery novel. There is much to enjoy in the book but I don't think I'll be exploring her other novels.
