Snap

The whole encounter seemed like something from a fairy story. Enchanted – but in a dark and scary way.

Belinda Bauer's Snap has something of a fairy story about it – with a main character who is a young boy named Jack (whose sisters are named Joy and Merry), and they with a mother dead too soon and a father not up to caring for them (like something right out of Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel) – and only by thinking that this plotline wasn't to be taken too literally could I get through this crime novel that isn't much of a crime novel (the Man Booker jury gush that it “undermines the tropes of its own genre ”, which I suppose is a way of agreeing that it doesn't live up to the expectations of its own genre). Because the fact is – there's nothing deep or creative or enchantingly written here; I have no idea how this credulity-stretching police procedural was chosen by the Booker jury to join a longlist that is meant to honour the best in English language literature; I'll still give it three stars because it's not Bauer's fault that this rather ordinary novel was set up to be compared against giants; this book is fine, but it ain't literature. Beware small but necessary spoilers ahead.

The opening is riveting: The three children (aged 11, 10, and 2) are left to wait in a hot car parked at the side of a motorway while their heavily pregnant mother waddles off to find an emergency phone to arrange a tow for the broken-down vehicle. Time drags out and the children eventually decide to find their Mom, and as the two older kids get worn out from carrying the baby and her diaper bag, and as the heat bears down and the dust swirls and as none of the cars that speed by stop to offer them help, the menace grows into something frightening and real: how could a mother just walk away from her kids like that and never come back? A week later, her murdered body is found, the father becomes inconsolable, and when the timeframe shifts to three years later, we discover that Dad has abandoned the children and Jack supports his sisters by breaking into houses while their owners are on holiday; becoming known as the Goldilocks burglar (there's that fairy story theme again) because he always sleeps in children's beds before taking what he wants and trashing the rest. Not only is Jack (at fourteen) overly stressed and angry at the world, but Joy has gone nutty (collecting newspapers and hoarding them throughout the house in teetering towers), and Merry is now a precocious five-year-old who spends her time mowing the grass for her pet tortoise and reading Stephen King novels. When Jack keeps saying that he's working so hard to keep his sisters out of care, I couldn't help but think, “Why? Everyone would be better off with some schooling and some regular meals, including Jack himself.” During one of his breakins, Jack thinks he discovers a clue to his mother's unsolved murder, and he sets off a chain of events that leads to the police getting involved and the crime investigation taking off. What starts as an admittedly interesting study of these children and their response to grief and loss becomes a coincidence-laden police investigation that satisfies on no level.

I always look for a book's title in the text while I'm reading, and “snap” occurs in three senses. The first time is in the aftermath of the police telling the father that his wife's body has been found and Jack goes to tell his sister:

Joy was in her bedroom playing Snap with her doll. She looked up at him and said, “What's all the shouting?”

He couldn't speak. He couldn't say. He just stood.

Next, when Merry is five and enjoying her daily freedom in the back garden but hears a menacing noise from the house next door:

Merry closed her eyes and stretched out her arms in the grass as if embracing the whole planet. She listened to the worms and the beetles with one ear, while the other filled with the soft chirping of birds and the drone of bumblebees coming and going like country-lane traffic.

There was a slow, throaty cough, then a snap and a clank.

A brief silence, then it happened again: prrrrr, snap, clank.

Merry raised her head and looked at the fence. Somebody next door was trying to start a lawnmower.

And finally, during a police interview with a witness:

“He always had a temper. He didn't snap often, but when he did, you knew about it.”

It could be argued that only the third quote really concerns the plot, but I have to assume that Bauer used all three instances deliberately (Joy could have been playing any card game with her doll; Merry could have been drawn to any noise from the new neighbour), so I'll just offer it all up as evidence of I-don't-know-what. I could complain here about all of the weird clues (like that knife that everyone but the cops understand the significance of) and curious plot choices (like the mother of a police officer not following up on suspected child neglect or her harbouring of a fugitive), but my biggest complaint about the investigation is how many times the cops themselves have to acknowledge the mounting coincidences: It was a coincidence, but he was not a man who scoffed at coincidence. He'd never worked a case where coincidence hadn't played a part...that might be the biggest and best coincidence...but there was that coincidence...the coincidence was too great...he picked nervously at the scab of horrible coincidence. Is that a book subverting the tropes of its own genre, or just bad plotting?

Snap kept me reading with interest (but I suspect it was really because I was waiting for whatever it was the Booker jury saw in it), and I think it would make a lovely and mindless summer beach read. I will be gobsmacked if it makes the cut for the Booker shortlist.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *