Anyway - this time, the Guardian asked me to review Hostage Three by Nick Lake. It was published in the Saturday 19th January Review, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be up on their website yet, so here's the text of my review:
Hostage Three
by Nick Lake
370pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99
Hostage Three starts by plunging us into the middle of an
adrenaline-drenched dramatic situation.
The narrator, a teenage girl called Amy, is being held hostage by Somali
pirates on her family's luxury yacht.
Her father is Hostage One; her stepmother Hostage Two; Amy is Hostage
Three. There's a gun to her head,
and she is about to be executed.
It's hard to imagine a more arresting opening. This is very much what creative writing
textbooks mean when they talk about starting a story in medias res. It's impossible
not to be hooked. But there's a
risk. Frontloading a narrative
means that nothing else is likely to match the beginning for sheer
intensity. And so it proves with
Hostage Three – yet as it rewinds to show us the events leading up to that
opening, Nick Lake's story develops not into the white-knuckle thriller ride
you might predict, but into something more complex, with unexpected political
intelligence and emotional power.
He lays out the backstory quickly and neatly. Amy's mother has recently died; her
wealthy banker father has remarried, and she's lost in a teenage rebellion that
distances her from everything around her, numbing her pain. Her father's response is to buy a yacht
and take his dysfunctional family on a round-the-world cruise – only to get
hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia.
Rather than the rising tension one might expect at this
point, a dreamy, dislocated tone takes over, as Amy falls for one of the
pirates: their translator Farouz, who is young and considerate and shares her
love of music. When it becomes
clear that he has feelings for her too, a Romeo and Juliet situation
develops. The electricity between
them is heightened by the impossibility of the situation, and nicely counter-pointed
by self-aware humour. Musing on
the wisdom of loving a pirate, Amy tells herself that "this is taking the
whole bad boy thing to another level," and that "some people would
probably say it was Stockhausen syndrome, or whatever it's called."
Farouz also serves as Amy's introduction to the lives that
lie behind the headline-making tales of piracy upon which this novel is
based. While she comes into the
story with little knowledge of Somali history, politics, economics and culture,
she ends it, as we do, having learned a great deal very lightly. "It hadn't even occurred to me
that these men had a story of their own, that they were anything but thieves,
pure and simple," she tells us.
Lake blows that idea out of the water, showing a well-researched and
nuanced grasp of the situation, carefully drawing distinctions between Somalis
and Somalis, Muslims and Muslims, even pirates and pirates. He doesn't glamorise them, but takes us
deep into their perspective, fleshing out their reality to such an extent that
by the end, we can see the Western characters through their eyes, and do not
necessarily like what we see.
All of which leaves him with a formidable problem: how do
you end a story like this? It
would be a hard-hearted reader who wouldn't want a happy ending for Amy and
Farouz, but perhaps only a naïve one would believe it possible. Lake's solution – a succession of
different endings – doesn't quite work for me. But the appeal of this book lies not with its narrative
mechanics. It's with the
characters and their voices, each possessing their own unique perspective and
subjectivity. By extending this
imaginative generosity even to people who would usually be villains, Hostage
Three goes beyond the tropes of genre fiction, and does something rather more
humane and interesting.
