Book Review: The Darkest Secret, by Alex Marwood

[inverarity]

Life among amoral posh Brits - what money, entitlement, and living in a moral vacuum does to families.

Penguin Books, 2016, 390 pages

Real estate mogul Sean Jackson is throwing himself a splashy 50th birthday party, but trouble starts almost immediately: His ex-wife has sent his teenage daughters to the party without telling him; his current wife has fired the nanny; and he's finding it difficult to sneak away to his mistress. Then something truly terrible happens: one of his three-year-old twins goes missing. No trace of her is ever found. The attendees of the party, nicknamed the Jackson Associates by the press, become infamous overnight. Twelve years later, Sean is dead. The Jackson Associates assemble for the funeral, together for the first time since that fateful weekend. Soon the barbed comments and accusations are flying. By the end of the weekend, one will be dead. And one of Sean's daughters will make a shocking discovery.

Alex Marwood's third novel is once again about the horrors of entitlement combined with narcissism, accelerated by the still-extant British class system.

I am now quite a fan of Alex Marwood. She's a British writer who is either of working class roots or write convincingly like one who is. She writes with contempt for the monied classes who are careless with the lives of those they consider beneath them and disposable, but there is also a humanity that animates all her characters, even the most despicable.

The tone and theme of her books are not terribly dissimilar from those of J.K. Rowling writing under her Robert Galbraith pen name. Rowling, as we know, was once an impoverished single mother, and while she tries to "remember where she came from," usually in admirable fashion, I can sometimes sense in her adult novels the struggle to maintain her identity as someone of humble origins, despite now being one of the richest women in the world.

Marwood hasn't hit the big time yet, so her writing is more raw, and while I wish her every success, her books have an edge that Rowling has lost after millions of dollars and many volumes of Harry Potter.

The Darkest Secret is about the disappearance, at age three, of little Coco Jackson, the daughter of a rich real estate developer. Coco's godmother launched a "Find Coco" media campaign that went viral in the early days of social media, but twelve years later, Coco remains missing, the mystery never solved.

The book alternates between two weekends: the weekend that Coco disappeared, twelve years ago, at her father's fiftieth birthday party, when he was surrounded by his rich friends, his second wife, and his future wives, and twelve years later, when he's found dead handcuffed to his bed, and eldest daughter (by his first wife) Camilla ("Millie") has to go face Daddy's friends and all her half-siblings and finally learn what happened when her half-sister Coco disappeared.

Sean Jackson is a first class asshole. Rich and narcissistic (and Marwood does an excellent job of plumbing his petty, narcissistic little psyche), he inevitably winds up estranged from all his daughters and his exes as he continually trades in wives for newer, hotter replacements. But his friends are all equally despicable. Sean's poor daughters grow up bereft of any real father figure and blaming themselves and each other. Sean's exes all hate each other and have little love for the spawn of his other mistresses (everyone was a mistress before becoming a wife). Even the girls, while their attitudes are understandable, are mostly unsympathetic brats.

Fortunately for the reader, Marwood's novels are not conventional mysteries — she switches POVs and takes us inside the heads of all her characters, so by the end of the book, the reader knows everything that really happened, even if the characters don't. But likewise, Marwood does not close her novels with tidy climaxes in which justice is done, and The Darkest Secret ends on a note that will not satisfy anyone who's been waiting the entire book to see these rich assholes get what they deserve. Except maybe Sean, but we already know from the start that he's dead, and ironically, while not blameless, he's actually not the most despicable of this bunch.

I've come to look forward to Alex Marwood's novels, which are satisfying modern British noir with a heaping dose of class consciousness. Besides J.K. Rowling, I think she's also a bit comparable to Stephen King — although she writes in a different genre (though I'd be seriously jazzed to see her venture into fantasy/horror), her stories are very plotty and character-driven and show an acute awareness of humanity, warts and all, and in particular what it's like to have gotten the shitty end of the stick in life.



Also by Alex Marwood: My reviews of The Wicked Girls and The Killer Next Door.

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My complete list of book reviews.

Comments

[conuly]

Any chance I could inveigle you to let me know what happened to the three year old?

The Darkest Secret

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

It's a little complicated - you want the whole story? You should read the book!

Coco

[tattletale86.livejournal.com]

Simone killed her by giving her and Ruby more “dopizone”. Ruby didn’t die because she had a stomach bug and threw up. Little Coco died. Sean, Jimmy, Maria, Robert and the “clusterfucks” buried her in the swimming pool hole next door, knowing the contractors would put the pool shell in the next day. IMHO, he married Linda and then Simone because they knew the secret of what happened to Coco. Linda wanted to call the police when they found Coco dead, but Maria said they’d all lose their jobs, children and go to jail if she called the police. She reluctantly agreed. No one knew Simone drugged the twins with extra, they thought it was the original amount given to them by Linda, who would take the fall. I think, though the book didn’t say, that Simone pushed Linda down the stairs. She’d do anything to have Sean to herself. Ugh. There were many awful, vile people in the book, but she was the worst. Claire never found out what happened to Coco. I think the group even tried to put the blame on Ruby later, saying she drowned Coco.

Class system

[fabio paolo barbieri (from livejournal.com)]

I doubt that Alex Marwood and JK Rowling's backgrounds are entirely comparable. Rowling is in no way working class. She was the daughter of an army officer, an innately next-to-upper-class background in England, and while a broken home and an unwise first marriage did leave her in an accumulation of financial distress, her basic background had nothing to do with England's shattered working classes. Her detestation of the English class system (and the fact that she's gone to live permanently in Scotland) do not detract from that. You can see it in her clothes, in the way that she speaks, in the way that she stands and moves. She has been brought up to a certain kind of good taste and self-control. She is remarkably sensitive to the differences in status and social destination within what would seem from outside a solid social block; take for instance the way that, in The Cuckoo's Calling, the murderer has been essentially losing caste and power as compared to the spectacularly upwardly mobile victim - a sort of observation that only people who live within those realities would notice. I, with all my 37 years in England, might not have thought of that kind of underlying story structure; but you might find it in the excellent detective novels of the unarguably upper class Antonia Fraser, which I recommend if you haven't read them already. It's inside knowledge.