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In the middle of the night Nick and Franky are at the site of an accident where a car has crashed down a slope.
In the next chapter, set earlier in the day, Sebastian (usually Seb) and Charley are having discussions with a German client over the filming of a car commercial in Cape Town. A host of car commercials have been made in the scenic regions around Cape Town.
Next, at an evening meal, between the day discussions and the night accident, six friends gather in a dark pretentious restaurant. They are celebrating the 5th anniversary of Nick, an engineer, and Franky, an advertising copywriter. Charley and Sebastian own an advertising agency. Adam is “a failed software designer” and Maria “a former model, stay-at-home-mother-of-three who dabbles in sculpture”.
Back to the accident scene, Nick takes a drunk Adam, who had been driving the crashed car, to the home of Franky’s mother. Franky is appalled with them.
In the morning after the accident a distraught Seb calls Franky. He says Charley is gone. For some reason she went out after they went to bed and collided with an oak tree.
There is a powerful scene where Sebastian waits with Franky to identify the body of Charley. The faint hope the body will not be Charley is extinguished at the identification.
Franky, at 39, is pregnant for the first time. She had been waiting to tell Charley.
Sebastian, Nick, Franky, Adam and Maria are haunted, even months later by the question:
Where had Charley been going that night?
Sebastian copes through denial.
Adam cannot remember what happened.
Franky tries to just get on with life.
Nick is pragmatically getting on and is irritated with the amount of time Franky is spending with Sebastian.
Maria spends most nights sleeping with the children.
In a brilliant line on their frustration, Greenwall, through Franky, captures modern life:
…. so confusing. The not knowing …. like we can’t Google it …
Sebastian hires a private investigator, Jan, as the police have stopped investigating when they concluded it was just an accident. They are uninterested in the Question.
The surviving five cannot move past the Question.
Months after the accident Sebastian has refused to move the blazer Charly left on a chair in their bedroom. Suddenly feeling the need for action he starts cleaning out Charley’s closets. There is a surprise.
They are the Beautiful people with lives of luxury but unsettled minds. They spend much of their time on introspection; obsessively at times. The story is more about their lives than answering the “Question”. Secrets slip around the characters. Initially I thought all the time in their minds distracted me from the story. Then I realized the portions of the book solving the mystery were more the distraction. At the end all the thoughts and solving the mystery come together. I found Greenwall skilled at penetrating the minds of her characters. All the time on introspection took me time to read as I considered their minds.
The book is a series of very short chapters. As the story proceeds go back and forth into the lives of the characters. Each chapter is in the voice of a major character. Six narrators plus (the six main characters and another) are a lot of voices, especially when they are going back to and fro in history. The story proceeds somewhat choppily.
I found it an interesting book though it took 150 pages before it really had me gripped. It was an unusual mystery. The ending was brilliant, touching and unique. It answered the Question in a way I would never have guessed.
This does sound like an unusual sort of book, Bill. I haven't read a lot of books in which the mystery is as much a distraction as it is anything else. There seems to be a real focus on the characters and their development, and that can make for a really interesting story; I'm not surprised you were drawn in by the end of it.
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