Judith Sullivan is a writer in London, originally from Baltimore. She is working on a crime series set in Paris. Fluent in French, she’s pretty good with English and has conversational Italian and German and 20+ years in Leeds improved her Yorkshire speak.
The title of this book is slightly misleading, in my view. Of course, it addresses issues of female safety and personal space, as well as a killing (or is it a disappearance?) that happens late at night.
However, the main theme to this creepy Icelandic book is sisters – jealousy, envy, love, competition, issues I can relate to as the eldest of three girls. Using the matrix of the crime novel told from the twin perspectives of sisters Stina (the one who vanished) and Marsi (the one who cannot let her sibling’s disappearance rest), Home Before Dark explores the tangled complexity of how girls and women who share parents interact and influence one another.
Home is also a rollicking good read that teases the reader on motivations as well as on facts. What we know from the outset is that Stina was walking home one November evening in 1967 but never made it. Nor has a body ever been found. We also know that younger sister Marsi narrating a decade on is wracked with guilt. In 1967, Marsi had been corresponding with an unknown male pen pal whom she was finally to meet on that fateful November evening. Had Stina not panicked and followed Marsi to the rendezvous, the elder sister might have survived to berate her younger sister on the folly of such an after-dark date and that would have been that.
Alas, no. Ten years on with not a peep heard from Stina and the police at a loss, the remaining family members grieve in the usual unhelpful ways of too much drinking, too little communication and barely making it through day-to-day existence.
Insomniac Marsi, now 24, has built a life of sorts in Reykjavik (the events occur in the backwater of Nátthagi) but she drifts from relationship to relationship and bottle to bottle. Dutifully on each disappearance anniversary she returns to the homestead to snatch up what little comfort these damaged people can offer each other. On the 10th anniversary she decides to snoop through some of Stina’s papers, and her discoveries drive the plot of Home.
Stina, it turns out, was more than a popular budding art student. She was also tragically curious and on the trail of a sort of Magdalen Laundry – Icelandic version. In picking up the pieces of her sister’s aborted inquiry into this sexist post-World War II relic, Marsi learns a good deal more about her sister’s vanishing act and the community into which both girls were born.
Aegisdottir sets the novel in the 1970s in part due to Iceland’s history and certain events that prop up the novel’s 1967-1977 plot points. It also seems as if she set Home in the decade that taste forgot to the gloomy, the brown, the beige, the rickety, the naff and other elements that defined the world 50 years back.
The sadness of the characters almost seems to impact their choices of clothing and make-up and food. As I visualized a film of the book, all the scenes were bathed in a sepia light, the female characters garishly made-up, the food seemingly without flavour or flair.
It is a tragic book but an urgent one and a sombre meditation on family in general but sisters more specifically.
