Book review: The Bay at Midnight by Diane Chamberlain
The Bay at Midnight
Entwining an examination of family relationships with a whodunnit mystery, The Bay at Midnight criss-crosses 40 years of secrets and guilt in a compelling read from Diane Chamberlain. Telling the story through the voices and viewpoints of three distinct characters plus their forty-years-younger selves provides an intriguing mishmash of impressions, misconceptions and good old-fashioned red herrings that keep you guessing a good way into the book.
The key characters are Julie, her sister Lucy and their mother Maria. A second sister, Isabel, died forty years previously, and it is this tragedy that we’re pulled back to again and again as Julie tries to make sense of what happened and how it knocked her life out of alignment right up to the present day.
As her 12-year-old self plays at being Nancy Drew, we play along too, uncovering clues and picking up on nuances that lead to the revelation right at the end of the book.
The flashbacks are set in and around a canal that flowed by the family’s summer bungalow near Cape Cod and we’re treated to vivid imagery that lights the pages, such as the sisters and mother all floating on inner tubes down to the bay.
Cultural references abound, intriguing for a British reader: 81-year-old Maria works at McDonalds, the family used to visit the boardwalk each summer, allusions are made to the TV show Leave it to Beaver. It’s almost impossible to imagine the story being shifted to the UK.
However, the aspects of the novel that deals with human emotion crosses cultural divides. One of the most fascinating is the way “gutsy” Julie grew up into her timid adult self, while her ever-anxious little sister Lucy shed the shackles of dread that haunted her childhood and became, as her mother says, a “bohemian”, violin-playing musician.
As Lucy says herself, when her sister died, the worst had happened and she’d survived, while Julie, reflecting on the fearless 12-year-old she’d once been, thinks: “It was hard to believe I’d ever been that child.”
Diane’s previous career as a social worker may well have helped her to understand how people react to traumatic events, adding a distinct realism to these parts of the novel. The issue of racism is also handled deftly, from the hostility faced by Maria in 1939 for being half-Italian to the Julie of 1962 being forbidden to fishing with the Lewis family from the other side of the canal, just because they were black.
There are also recurring themes about motherhood, love and mistakes, with Maria saying to Julie about her rebellious granddaughter Shannon: “It’s a never-ending circle.”
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the circle collapses into a heap of yarn at the end, with all the strands neatly tied up. It’s a bit of a Hollywood ending, in fact, with more than a hint of Nancy Drew about it.
The Bay at Midnight by Diane Chamberlain is published by Mira Books on January 1st 2010, and is available to buy from Amazon
To submit a review of a book, course, film, magazine or website, please email judy@EssentialWriters.com
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