Her

Her (2014)
by Harriet Lane

Sometimes a book really grabs you, right from the  first page. There seem to have been an increasing number of these absorbing psychological thrillers available of late - Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Before I Go to Sleep, Unbecoming and The Kind Worth Killing, to name just a few. It's a great time to be an enthusiastic reader with a penchant for suspense. Her is another one to add to this list.

It's the story of two women - Emma (a lonely, stressed and tired mother with a toddler and another on the way) and Nina (a sophisticated artist with a seemingly perfect life) whose unlikely friendship starts out quite sweetly but gets creepier and creepier as it becomes clear that Nina has her own reasons for wanting to worm her way into Emma's life. Exactly what Nina wants from Emma remains unclear for much of the book but each chapter (these alternate between Emma's and Nina's points of view) adds a little more depth to the characters and to their story and the tension ratchets up with every page. Both women are extremely complex and well-written characters. Both are women who are psychologically unraveling in different ways and it's fascinating (and a bit disturbing) to see them both slowly falling apart.

Her is a beautifully written, dark novel that explores themes of memory, identity and revenge. It's a very convincing study of an unusual relationship between two women who could easily have become cliches (the unhappy stay-at-home-mum and the unhappy aging career woman) but instead are fascinating and unique characters. Harriet Lane is very good at capturing the everyday details of life and the frustrations felt by both women are so very believable and relatable that both Nina and Emma become real, three-dimensional people. Emma's housewife frustrations are beautifully and sympathetically observed, as she struggles with the loss of her own identity:"the vanishing of personality as everyone else's accrues".
The unresolved questions around the mysterious, chic, Prada-coated Nina create a building sense of paranoia and suspense, which drive the story along at a cracking pace throughout its relatively short 261 pages.

Apparently Nina wears Prada coats, so I assume she looks something like this. Classy.

There is one real issue with Her - it's not so much the ending itself (which is subtle, chilling and cleverly done) but the bit just before this, which finally explains Nina's motivation behind her actions throughout the book. Without giving away too many details, Her is a fast-paced, adrenaline-driven thriller that builds perfectly throughout until you are desperate to find out what happened in Nina's past to drive her behaviour - then you find out and it's all just a bit of an anti-climax. This has caused severely divided opinions among readers. A quick look on Goodreads or Amazon will show you a large number of 4- and 5-star reviews and an equal number of 1- and 2-star reviews, from readers bitterly disappointed by the book's resolution. According to one school of thought, this is a fantastic, well-constructed psychological thriller with a bad ending. The other school of thought argues that the book remains true to its realistic characters and their real-life motivations, culminating in a very realistic and true-to-life conclusion. The book itself argues for this point of view at one stage, when Nina is disappointed by the over-the-top ending of a novel, complaining that real life doesn't have such dramatic plot twists. Nina feels that real life "turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small, quiet moments, misunderstandings or disappointments, the things that it's easy to overlook".

It's a good argument, but in my opinion, an unconvincing one. While Her is more than your run-of-the-mill page-turner, it is still a thriller - a very well-written one, with extremely distinctive and convincing characters - and it ultimately disappoints with a conclusion that fails to match the quality of plotting throughout the rest of the story. It is the only part of the book that seems patched-together at the last minute rather than intricately planned out, as if Harriet Lane hadn't thought of a motivation for Nina until she got there and then plonked in the first thing she could thought of to vaguely explain things...
 However, the rest of the book is so very good, that it remains a great read anyway - don't expect too much from those why-did-she-do-it chapters and you really will be wildly impressed.

8/10