Written by Tom Carrao
Some days you just don’t quite feel yourself. For Ellis Kemp, the troubled lead character of C.J Skuse’s new thriller, this sensation has elevated to lifestyle, a roundelay of aliases effortlessly assumed and cast off according to individual encounter. The gesture is less a malicious and calculated character trait than the unhappy consequence of past trauma and circumstance. Ellis (or Mary, Ruth, Charlotte, Genevieve, and, officially, Joanne, all entities with full and vibrant-albeit mostly invented histories) has been placed in witness protection.
Ellis has been long on the run from some nasty figures from the drug underworld with whom her late father engaged with and he later informed on them, a deed for which he was hunted down in the first stage of the programme and murdered in front of Ellis, occasioning a second, deeper step into hidden, isolated life for his stricken daughter, and a further fracturing of identity. Ellis’s fraught, tense present is continually (sweetly) interrupted by idyllic memories of summers spent in the companionable environment of her aunt’s family, and especially the conspiratorial company of her cousin Foy, with whom she has many imaginative adventures, candy orgies, and wandering conversations, unspooling slowly in the heat and haze, a refuge from the precarious existence with her dad. It’s the reverie of childhood all good kids can expect and which parents should provide.
Skuse teases out the details by which Ellis lives her life—each element of her multiple performances can be traced back to the halcyon days of her youth. Each name in her vast repertoire of personas has a direct connection to the past (the names came from inscriptions on tombstones). Obsessions, hang ups, addictions, habits, likes and dislikes carry straight on from adolescence. Personal behaviour, which can be seen by her colleagues and acquaintances as actions of an unsound mind, are in fact the characteristics of a severely arrested mentality. Ellis may appear deranged, but Skuse works hard on her behalf to reveal the enormity of a life crushed and beaten, of a young girl distorted just at the cusp of womanhood, of an idealised world suddenly upended. Despite her extreme, wildly paranoid conduct, Skuse is able to instil a great measure of sympathy in the reader towards Ellis, giving a firm, comprehensive lesson in the dear cost of her life, a clear insight into her damaged psyche.
Scants, her handler and only real connection to the past, occasionally visiting to drop off provisions, downplays Ellis’s latest concerns that someone may be hounding her, perhaps an old associate of her father’s recently released from prison determined to carry out sentence on the damned daughter. She receives a series of phone calls in which no one speaks, is inundated with creepy catalogues devoted to the latest coffin models, and, most alarmingly, shares an uncanny resemblance to a woman recently murdered at the hotel where she works. Plus there is the attractive but suspicious personal trainer who has recently moved in to her apartment building who runs hot and cold.
When, midway through the novel, Skuse abruptly switches focus to adult Foy, especially given the reader leaves Ellis at a moment of awful crescendo, momentum entirely collapses. Foy, in the intervening years, has had her own share of pain, tragedy, and loss, as well, but it can’t hope to be as compelling or incandescent as that suffered by her cousin. Unlike Ellis’s brazen and audacious instability, Foy is quite ordinary in her misfortune-she has become closed off, exasperated, tight, quarrelsome. The second half of the novel follows Foy as she tracks down Ellis, only to discover she has disappeared, apparently in violent fashion. She enlists Scants to help her, who is initially reluctant, then newly spirited. Skuse coaxes them to at first a detente, then strains credulity by having them drift towards a romantic relationship. Perhaps in such a singly charged environment, both reeling from loneliness and profound exhaustion, intensely circling each other’s orbits, in a vacuum of their own, attraction would erupt, but something about it doesn’t seem genuine or even necessary. Ditto an animal welfare representative who appears in an earlier sequence who eventually returns as unlikely love interest.
As Foy and Scants draw closer to Ellis, Skuse presents them with moral and ethical quandaries that will test their boundaries with just how far they are willing to go to save Ellis—and the storytelling kicks back into gear and focus at this stage after a fairly moribund mid-section. There are poignant moments of despair and reunion, an overwhelming knowledge in Foy at just how momentous the hardship of Ellis’s life has been. One additional niggle: a portrait of Frida Kahlo, a fellow outsider reclaimed by history, hangs with metaphorical prominence in Ellis’s apartment the identity of whom, despite her emergence into a wide cultural significance in the last few decades, needs to be explained to much of the cast, which seems more than a bit wilfully disingenuous.
Yet what started as a nicely sustained tough, tense tale by the end has lapsed into an altogether too soft, easy, saccharine conclusion, everyone commendably paired off and installed within the grounds of a French estate, a glamorous extended family. The family, in fact, that Ellis has always deserved and from which she had been cruelly torn. Skuse may want to reward Ellis and Foy for their long-term misery, but the reader may desire a more difficult (realistic) transition.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Joanne Haynes has a secret: that is not her real name.
And there’s more. Her flat’s not hers. Her cats aren’t hers. Even her hair isn’t really hers.
Nor is she any of the other women she pretends to be. Not the bestselling romance novelist who gets her morning snack from the doughnut van on the seafront. Nor the pregnant woman in the dental surgery. Nor the chemo patient in the supermarket for whom the cashier feels ever so sorry. They’re all just alibis.
In fact, the only thing that’s real about Joanne is that nobody can know who she really is.
But someone has got too close. It looks like her alibis have begun to run out….
