It’s difficult to check out a brand-new Louise Doughty book without picturing it as a grandstanding tv drama, provided her previous form with Apple Tree Yard, her 2013 mental thriller which was adjusted for BBC One in 2017, and Crossfire, which she composed for the little screen.
Set worldwide of British intelligence, A Bird in Winter ticks all the right boxes for edge-of-your-squishy-sofa Sunday night fodder. Feisty female hero for Nicola Walker to play? You bet. Epic surroundings that takes in remote Scottish islands, Norwegian fjords and Icelandic “volcanic lavender”? Oh yes. There is even a subplot about female relationship that crackles with possible sexual stress.
Three pages into Doughty’s tenth book, a bombshell from Heather Kneale’s manager Kieron in a department conference sets our lead character’s alarm bells clanging and she is off, starting an escape she has actually pre-planned for factors Doughty will spend the book explaining.
“I have the sensation that I have just dived into a river on a hot day. It’s shocking but refreshing, and as long as I keep swimming, I’ll be fine,” Doughty composes, as Heather emerges from her Birmingham-based workplace building. By swimming, Heather indicates running, or taking practically every form of transportation she can, to put sufficient range in between her and her previous office, a secret branch of “the Service” developed to capture unclean spies, till she feels safe from whoever is on her tail.
Because Heather understands somebody seeks her. But who? “They already know you’re not going to London,” Kieron informs her, his voice an undesirable shock on her burner phone, just hours into her escape. “He didn’t say we, he said they,” she worries.
Doughty’s writing is fluid and tense, every page humming with impending risk. She composes with remarkable uniqueness. We are within Heather’s head and seeing what she sees, whether she is retrospectively regreting her ineptitude at hiding (“like a child who ducks behind a slender tree trunk and convinces herself that as long as she turns to face the trunk and keeps both hands over her eyes then because she can’t see anyone, that means she can’t be found”) or shivering and wet under some trees, her pre-owned bomber coat “like one of those soft holes sponges you use to mop the kitchen counter”.
But the exactitude of the information did, sometimes, make me wish to toss up my hands and shout, “It’s me! The exhausted reader! I’m the one trailing your every step north as you flee from British jurisdiction”.
That small gripe aside, Doughty’s ability in stringing out a tense, well-plotted story had me checking out late into the night to discover what took place, even if her option of very first individual storyteller implied I might presume Heather made it through, the hunted outmaneuvering the hunter. Half-method through she insinuates a “funny you should ask” when explaining how she concerned sign up with the army after university – there is enjoyable to be had questioning who this “you” she deals with here is.
Amid the drama and the surroundings, Doughty wishes to advise us that like Heather, we might all make with keeping in mind that life can go awry when we least anticipate it. As she composes: “When the unexpected happens, then afterwards, you always know it can happen. There is no unknowing that fact.” Sink into that couch and buckle in for the trip.
A Bird in Winter by Louise Doughty is released by Faber (£14.99)
