The Locust Farm by
Jeremy Dronfield
pbk out January 99
(Headline)
at £5.99
Imagine Psycho meeting Wuthering Heights, and you get some idea of the atmosphere of this extraordinary novel. Carole Perceval lives in a remote Yorkshire farm, sheltering from her own past. One stormy evening a stranger turns up, a man who claims to have lost his memory. The story explode from there, diving to and fro among a tangle of apparently unrelated narrative threads.
It has to be said that this tangle is never satisfactorily resolved, not unless coincidence and implausibility and narrative gerrymandering can be counted as sources of satisfaction. Another problem is that the prose shows a tendency to overheat, producing sentences like “legs keep trudging - vacuous inertia dragging at the drained muscles”. Vacuous inertia? This sort of language is the literary equivalent of monosodium glutamate: it blasts the critical tastebuds but fails to enhance the flavour. It doesn’t do much for the meaning, either.
And yet, and yet. This novel richly deserved the accolade of being shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger of 1998. Dronfield is an ambitious and gifted writer. He takes the gothic thriller by the scruff of its neck and gives it a damned good shaking. The Locust Farm is full of strong, striking characters. There is much powerful writing. Dronfield says, and implies, many interesting things about questions of identity and guilt.
This may be a flawed novel, but it is also one to be proud of. When the author has devoted more thought to plot, narrative and the relationship between them, there is every chance that he will develop into a crime novelist of distinction. I look forward to his next book.
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
