The Girl Before by JP Delaney
Quercus
Pp. 406
Edward has designed a house that
is minimalist in appearance, with all the modern technology to make it seem
almost sentient. To rent One Folgate Street, with its open-plan features, floating
staircase and clean spaces, potential tenants must answer a series of questions
before gaining admittance. Once they have been accepted, they understand that
he has a sense of authority over them. Everything in the house is computerised
and Edward controls the computer; if the tenants don’t answer the questions to
his satisfaction, he will turn off the lights or the hot water for the shower. The
questions get increasingly pertinent and personal, as the house computer search
engine will only respond with certain information, and it collates all the findings
to provide ‘helpful hints’. The novel questions when being cared for becomes
being spied on; when does being protected become being stifled?
It is clear that Edward is a
control-freak. He needs to control all aspects of his – and others’ – lives;
not just their living arrangements. He cooks in a very methodical manner with
precisely the right hard-to-find ingredients; he admires foreign things so that
he can appear knowledgeable and correct people’s pronunciation to constantly
assert authority. He also likes the Japanese custom of hitobashira, which he tells a tenant is about burying dead people
under buildings, but she later finds out it refers to burying the living. So
far; so creepy.
But wait; there’s more. He has very
similar relationships with very similar women, two of whom live in his house
and narrate alternate chapters. Jane is ‘now’. She has had a stillbirth which
makes her vulnerable; she has memories which Edward triggers, she thinks
accidentally. Emma was ‘then’. She had been attacked and raped by burglars –
her partner, Simon, adores her, but can’t live by her stringent rules or those
of the house. Jane’s friend, Mia, points out how much Jane looks like Emma, the
previous tenant, who died in the house, and Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, before
that. Emma defends him, “Men often go for the same type. Women do too, of
course. It’s just that in our case, it isn’t usually physical resemblance so
much as personality.” But when does it stop being a ‘type’ and become a fetish?
Past experiences are repeated in
the present; the lines Edward uses echo over each other as he says them to both
women and they find themselves starting to question his past. When Jane
questions Edward about his former relationship (his wife and previous tenant both
died in suspicious circumstances), he tells her not to look into it. “The past
is over; that’s why it’s the past. Let it go, will you?” There are heavy-handed
metaphors about clean slates with faintly discernible chalk marks from previous
writings, and if we hadn’t already got the point, Jane spells it out for the
hard of understanding with a high-school art essay about palimpsests and pentimenti.
As with any novel including the
word ‘girl’ in the title, it seems we must have sex, violence, and an
unreliable narrator. It is also worth bearing in mind that it is written by a
man. A policeman advises Emma, “We take cases of rape very seriously. That means
assuming every woman who says she’s been raped is telling the truth. The
flipside of that is that we take false rape allegations equally seriously.” This
suggests they are equally common. Fact check: over the past 20 years, only 2%
of rape accusations proved to be false. It’s not that men can’t write realistic
female characters, but a reliance on pop psychology and simplified gender stereotypes
doesn’t help.
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