The Lover

The Lover takes place in 1940 London during the Blitz. Daily bombings, shelters, destruction, death, waiting, terror, no sleep. Wilson does a great job of describing the environment in this story of three people, and the wonderful capacity of Londoners of those days to keep going, to just survive. The focus is on a young woman, working in an office as a secretary, a prostitute, and a killer. Chapters interweave with the POV of each, often describing the same incident three times, but always from a very different perspective. It's a hypnotic, tense, fascinating story all the way to its brutal climax. I will read more Laura Wilson. 4.5 stars, completed 11/15.

Reviewed for Reviewing the Evidence. A creepy and excellent psychological sketch of two women and a man who is going to kill one of them. My review concludes "This is not anything like the usual serial killer story in which good and evil are locked in struggle, with women's bodies used to keep score. In Wilson's wartime London, mindless violence is in the air like the dust of bombed houses. We have a tendency to romanticize the Blitz and Battle of Britain as a time when civilization stared barbarity in the eye and barbarity blinked. Yet as Wilson brings that moment back to life, it is nobody's finest hour. She is so good at evoking the everyday experience of the raids and the fear felt by airmen who know the odds against them that we show more begin to think the violence we do to one another in war is no more honorable or ennobling than what happens when angry, crazed men seek release by killing women." show less

This book is set in the 1940's during the bombings. It is so well written that you really beleive that you are there. It revolves around three main characters, Lucy an office worker, Rene a prostitute and Jim who is in the RAF. Also there are murders but you know all along who is the baddie so there is no guessing who dunnit. There are a few moments that made me smile like when Lucy and sister but saucepans on their heads because they couldn't find the tin hats. First book for me by this author and it won't be my last. Not sure why it is called The Lover.

This is set in the London of late 1940, during the Blitz, when the young pilots who mainly make up the Royal Airforce, are the heroes of London. Everywhere they go they are feted, treated with great reverence, almost as gods. They often fly several sorties a day and newly trained recruits are often killed on their first flight. Living in London itself and carrying on with 'normal life' often requires great heroism, particularly at night when the German bombers fly over with great regularity and demolish a new section of housing. People spend their nights under the kitchen table, under the stairs, or in public air raid shelters, but life goes on. And so does murder. Women ply the streets as prostitutes, offering quick diversions from the show more physical dangers, but this is also a dangerous profession because someone is committing murder. An interesting book because the reader knows almost from the beginning who the murderer is. It is a book also about the miscarriage of justice. You'll probably enjoy it if you like historical settings- it does make you think about what life must have been like then. And there are several 'human interest' threads too.
It is a very disorienting setting for the characters as the main local landmarks are rapidly disappearing in the constant bombing.
Many people are too afraid to leave their houses but some spend much of their time in air raid shelters.
In the Prologue, two men drunkenly weaving their way home fall over the body of a young woman who has been rather messily killed with a tin opener.The book then begins properly 5 weeks earlier when some girls go for drinks with RAF pilots and one seems to narrowly escape being raped.
There are a range of characters including Lucy who spends most of her nights under the kitchen table because of the air raids, Rene who offers quick sex for money services and picks up most of her customers in the air raid shelters, and Jim the pilot who was the potential rapist who finds flying his plane a quasi-sexual experience but can't do it with girls. show less

This novel is a thriller but with the additional element of taking place in 1940 London. The story follows the lives of 3 very different people whose lives intersect in the story. It is a terrrifying time and place to live with bombs falling every night but someone is murdering prostitutes and their mutilated bodies add to the terror. Laura Wilson is indeed taking her palce as one of Britain's top mystery writers.

In October 1940, London is a sleep-deprived city due to frequent air-raids. This story of events over just a few weeks is told by three alternating first person narrators, whose different perceptions are shaped by their age and circumstances.

West End prostitutes are being brutally assaulted and murdered. Yes, this is a historical serial killer novel of sorts, but please don't let that put you off. The main focus of the novel is less on violent death and gore than on the fears and worries of the characters, ranging from trivia to the truly terrifying.

Jim is a fighter pilot, one of a group of very young men publicly glorified and glamorised as heroes. He has been fascinated and excited by planes since childhood, and when he first got to show more fly, felt incredibly powerful. Now, though, the possibility and even likelihood of death is a terrifying reality, as several of his colleagues fail to return from flying missions. He is looking for another kind of thrill in picking up women in central London's Soho, but it isn't sex he has in mind.

Rene is a prostitute in the West End. She is scared of being caught in the air raids, and frightened by the brutal deaths of several of the women she knows in the same profession. How else, though, can she pay her rent and bills and give her sister money for her son's keep?

Lucy is a 21-year-old secretary, whose sleep and journey home from work are regularly interrupted by the air raids. Family life at home in Clapham is tense and Lucy has a lot to think about. Rene and Lucy both have the same type of coat, and some superficial resemblance in appearance, but of course they are totally different kinds of women, or are they? Both face worries about day-to-day work and family concerns, while carrying on their lives in the face of the bombs.

The plot of the story, such as it is, hinges on the characters seeing, encountering and finally meeting each other, as they all take refuge in the Soho Square air raid shelter. THE LOVER is not a whodunit as we know who is killing the women quite early on, and although there is some suspense, a few moments when I wanted to warn characters not to do things, for me this was not the most important aspect of THE LOVER either.

Many historical novelists spend far too much time describing streets, clothes and objects to remind the reader that the book she is reading is set in the past. THE LOVER works very well as an evocation of people reacting to a situation at the time when it was set, a historical novel about wartime states of mind not period detail. It is an edgy, unsettling, thought-provoking crime novel.

This review was originally written for www.reviewingtheevidence.com by me and posted there:

http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=4236 show less