Second Life
SJ Watson
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 9780857520197
Julia, a wife and mother who lives an upper-middleclass life in London, gets the news that her younger sister, Kate, who lives in Paris, has been murdered. The police find no clues about the unknown assailant; it appears to be a gratuitous murder – or alternatively, one finely planned: this is what Julia starts to assume when she learns, via a friend of her late sister’s, that Kate had met men online.
A layer of grief is added to her mourning because Julia and her husband, Hugh, had adopted her sister’s child, Connor, when he was a baby. (We soon learn that Kate’s lifestyle had made motherhood impossible.) Julia feels guilty, since Kate had been trying to regain custody of Connor before her death. Also, had she, Julia, not always been her sister’s keeper?
With their own mother having died young, Julia, who had been her sister’s guardian in childhood, finds her guilt compounded. The guilt comes across as weightier than the grief. This is the case in the plot as a whole going forward. Guilt is a leading emotion.
One could say that this story is about a death in a family and how it can be a tipping point, the nudge that will unravel the almost well-united family. (That sounds like interesting human psychology.) But in another breath it’s correct to say that this is simply a story about lies and deceit, some of those planned and plotted, and some just silly decisions or inaction.
Julia joins one of the online hook-up sites that her sister used, with the intention to find the killer. With nothing to go on, Julia, trying to think like her sister might have, has a sixth sense about one of the men profiled: he is younger than her and his name is Lukas. She decides via chats that he is innocent of her sister’s death, but she becomes entwined in a relationship with him nonetheless.
It’s at this point of her desire for this virtual man that I started to doubt the plot. Not because women don’t behave like that, but because Julia’s motivation has not been sketched strongly enough.
Does the writer, who is a man, successfully portray the character of a woman, his protagonist, Julia? This is something well achieved in his debut novel Before I go to sleep. But this character is not wholly convincing.
The first time I started to doubt his skill was at the dialogue between Julia and her son Connor, in the vicinity of page 60. Watson, who is elsewhere adept at describing facial gestures of characters, does not have Julia searching for typical reassurances of gesture, nor does she even recall any of them, on her son’s face. The mother-son relationship seems somewhat implausible, not well thought through. Even if Connor is, like Julia, retreating into the shadow cast by Kate’s death, the writer does not convince us that Julia is a mother. Connor is too much of an appendage and too little like someone whom Julia knows intimately. As much as we might feel convinced that Julia is a woman (though a silly one), it’s harder to believe she is a mom. When you love someone – an adult, a child, your husband, your lover – you know their mannerisms. And when the loved one is going through something, not being himself, whether that is due to death in the family or teenage years, you miss those gestures, and you think about them, you run over them in your head.
If a character is racked with guilt and grief, it would be motivation enough to play detective for a dead sister, but Julia does not seem quite racked. So why does she bother? Is she unknowingly taking a destructive path as a tool to uncover a new consciousness? Is she choosing destruction as a tool to make something fundamental in her own life change? To bring about happiness? Or to find goodness in herself? The overall result is that it’s hard to tell what motivates or, more accurately, demotivates Julia.
For a mother and wife of a doctor (ie a busy person) she is floating through her life more like a single woman might. It makes it hard to take the character portrayal to heart. When does she clean the house? (The author throws in one casual house-cleaning description towards the end of the book.) We learn about what’s in her fridge for lunch or dinner, but how did it get there? There is, in fact, more detail about her husband’s profession as a doctor, which makes his life more plausible. Ironically, her husband is the one who mentions a shopping list when talking about a problem at work! Perhaps the writer’s ability to use accurate and interesting details to describe the profession of doctor is due to Watson’s having worked in various hospitals himself.
Watson’s choice of conflict for the character is both external and internal. The protagonist’s internal conflict (alcoholism) is useful enough as a generally known and universally “acceptable” intrapersonal problem. It’s a generalised enough inner conflict for most readers to find sympathy (even if the reader is only obsessed with buying shoes incessantly in order to escape life’s problems). However, one has to ask whether this choice of conflict is perhaps not too arbitrary, conveniently slapped on and conveniently justifying her other additions.
As a reader you do experience moments of anxiety (the external conflict). Anxiety is the whole purpose of the book, the genre being a psychological thriller. These moments come via the mysteries in the wake of her own life (whatever happened to the man called Marcus?) and her sister’s death (who was the murderer?). And then the online adrenalin and paranoia. The reader’s trepidation is heightened by the man at Julia’s window at night, apart from the man she encounters online and a few other less-worrying anxieties that act as sub-plots. Some of the dialogue, the trust and mistrust, work really well; others not so well.
SJ Watson is not the first writer to describe the dangers of cyberspace. Yet, somehow I feel that the South African writer SA Partridge did it better in her book Dark Poppy’s Demise. From a feminist analysis, this plot can be very irritating: one has to wonder when the roles will be reversed? When are the men going to be the prey?
The title is not only a reference to Julia’s marriage (which gave her a second chance), but also to her affair (a double life), and beyond that also to this strange double: as the plot unravels, Julia has become a voyeur to her sister’s life, but also a doppelganger – she has become like her sister. Is Julia perhaps exactly like her sister, with the only difference being the addition of someone stable like Hugh?
Moreover, I was left wondering about the back-story. What were all the various similarities between the sisters and their individual pasts and pains before page 1 – where did that begin for each individually? Were they perhaps, due to dulling of their spirits, doppelgangers all along? And from that emerges a nugget to take from the book, albeit a subtle one: Is Julia herself “dead” from page 1 without even knowing it? Or is she just bored, superficial?
Would the protagonist have got herself into this mess if her sister had not been killed? What drives her character on any other day? She gives that clue away on page 176: she hasn’t “had a life” for a long time. At this point one wonders what she means – is it suppression of her needs? Or is she horrified by the drudgery and tedium of the stability of an average life? Or has she drifted away from “her saviour”, her husband? Has her life started to lack purpose, morality? Nowhere is this explained well enough. It’s a vague mishmash of all of those things. But the quest to try to understand what she considers to be “a life” is what kept me reading after page 176. The character does become more plausible for about 100 pages after that, her emotions more real. We find out at last what might drive her: she likes people who are fluid; she’s drawn to rolling stones who gather no moss; she like to capture their fluidity on camera. Later she talks about the raw scenes she likes to capture on her camera, and her inclination to love adventure. The effect of all this scant detail makes one wonder why the character has a crisis of identity at age 37 other than something quite insipid and hum-drum?
We learn about what she needs (to get a life she wants), even though it’s not what she thought she wanted (to protect her son; to find her sister’s murderer; to ease her guilt and grief). But this real need of hers, what she wants subconsciously – it is so ill-defined.
There is brilliant dialogue, but authentic human psychology failed to emerge in this story. Near the end of the book appears a quote that other reviewers have used in their introductions – a quote that indicates that our relationships are all masks: what we present to one person is different from what we show another. It is worrying that this is held up as a rationale for the plot.
Yes, people present differently, even if just slightly, to different “audiences”; and yes, people tell lies or withhold the truth. But these two ideas are not compatible. The former, the persona (public or private), is one thing – it is part of healthy interactions and a natural human characteristic – we simply can’t be everything to everyone; but the latter, deceit, is another thing altogether. By linking these ideas, the writer’s rationale comes across as juvenile.
This is a thriller set in the digital age. Watson is not bad at pin-pointing the mechanisms and motives of an affair: the ambiguous hope for stasis and change. To elaborate: the hope that desire in the moment will freeze that moment in time, so that all one’s problems, all concerns past and present, melt away in the heat of the moment and bring everything to a stop. That wish is coupled with the high risk that could bring about a big and lasting change at any given second. I say “pin-pointing” and not “describing”, because he spells it out for us. That difference between telling and not showing is somewhat disappointing, but perhaps one can put it down to the style of writing, justified by the genre?
I could not help feeling that this book is something that would have come out of a writing workshop. All the boxes for narrative have been ticked. But somehow it lacks masterful writing. You could say that it’s textbook-perfect. But does that make it a good book?
In the final analysis, does it live up to its genre? As readers we spend our time in the protagonist’s head, not once understanding the narrative via metaphor or any sophisticated writing device. Apt? Probably. Memorable writing? As a psychological thriller it did leave me with a dull sense of worry and even paranoia for about 100 pages in the middle. You could say that those are emotions well evoked. Does it deserve a 6,5 or 7 out of 10? Yes. But for a specific audience: it should be prescribed reading for high school students. Its flaws make it a great book for analysis and – added bonus – it is likely that it will warn a few readers about the dangers of the digital age.
The moral of the story is really: find out who the family and friends are of your date/lover/boyfriend; find out who the family and friends are of your flatmate; don’t withhold information from your spouse.
The fact that these things were not found out by the characters is mostly plausible, because people can be lazy about “background checking” when it comes to matters of the heart. But I did get the idea that the writer does push it a bit! I did have that moment near the end where I had to giggle at the writer as being a bit of a chancer with a plot.
But perhaps in the characters’ lack of background checking there is also a warning, even though the book is obviously not a morality tale.