The Sleeper

Emily Barr is an author I used to read very regularly several years ago but after finding a lull in her storylines I had taken a break for a while and it was only when I saw The Sleeper advertised that I felt I wanted to try one again. The cover and the story outline on the jacket grabbed my attention and drew me in.

This is the story of Lara and her husband Sam, they have relocated from London to Cornwall in a bid to slow life down and start a family but after IVF has failed and their savings have run out Lara finds that actually she isn't fulfilled by her marriage and she craves escape from her quiet domestic life in Cornwall and agrees to take a job in London, to which she will travel each Monday by sleeper train and return each Friday by the same method. Her husband Sam doesn't want her to go, preferring to have her close by but Lara persuades him and she begins a 6-month contract in the city.

Some months later she finds herself loving life away from her husband, she likes the challenges of her job, the big city life and most of all she has found herself a lover Guy, a fellow traveller on the weekly sleeper train. She is suddenly making plans to leave her husband and begin a new life with Guy, just as soon as they both tell their respective spouses. Before they have the chance, however, Guy's body is found on board the sleeper train and Lara has vanished and everyone is left with no other conclusion than she must be responsible for his death. The only person who seems to think Lara isn't responsible is her quiet, introverted neighbour Iris who has only met Lara a few times but has reason to suspect her friend was hiding secrets in her past that may explain her disappearance.

This book was a really difficult one to immerse myself in initially and that is because I didn't particularly like Lara at the outset. She is portrayed, I found, as a selfish individual. She has a loving and attentive husband who is providing her with a wonderful lifestyle and yet she doesn't seem happy, she is chasing escape from him and intends on doing so whether or not he wants her to. Once she begins her commute to London she almost finds him an inconvenience that she has to deal with each weekend, putting on a front and pretending to be happy. She has fractured relationships with almost everyone in her life and family and at times I found her personal skills to be somewhat lacking. She seems devoid of emotion and I didn't enjoy the first section of the book because I just couldn't gel with her at all. From the point where she if offered the job in London to the point she disappears the book is told firmly from her perspective and this meant there was no escaping her.

Moving into the second section of the book we move to Iris as the narrator as she takes on the mystery of who murdered Guy, the man Lara was sleeping with and the potential explanation for where Lara has gone. Iris is a more sympathetic character but again we immediately realise things aren't quite right. She also has a partner with whom she lives and things are clearly not well in their relationship either, she has had a lottery windfall and yet she is hiding it from her boyfriend and making plans to leave, perhaps without telling him. Her fascination with Lara and her life is unusual if not only in the fact that they had only met a handful of times and yet so convinced is she that her friend is innocent she travels to London and starts digging up Lara's past in order to prove it. Iris is much easier to have sympathy with as a character and in this section of the book we realise the reasons for her strange relationship and find ourselves understanding her lifestyle and the need to perhaps break away from the home in which she lives.

This book really was a bit of a mixed bag, there were great points where I'd be pulled in by the narrative and the mystery and I'd be right on board, desperate to find out what was going to happen and then there were those moments I'd be scratching my head and thinking why the author had possibly thought this plot twist was a good idea. There is so much going on by the end of the book that the eventual conclusion is a bit underwhelming. It's all so sordid and strange and inappropriate. In fact, it leaves the whole book feeling like a bit of a muddle. We had all these stories early on in the book that seem to be cast aside in favour of a new direction that we never fully go back and address some of the plot created at the start. We never pay more than a backwards glance to Lara's poor husband nor the wife of the man killed on the train. It seems a bit of an investment on the author's behalf to create them at all if only to ignore them later.

I wanted to love it, I wanted to say that I had rediscovered a wonderful author but instead I found that what had stopped me reading her novels was still the same issue I had with them now. In pursuit of a twisted, word wide mystery Emily Barr is still taking her plot lines a few steps too far, in their complexity she is losing the readers empathy for her heroines who are often self centered and not particularly endearing. I think it may be another while before I read her books.