Book Of The Month January, 2009
Something Might HappenJulie Myerson
On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was not an obvious victim. She just wasn’t, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson’s concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community and specifically on Tess herself, her husband Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess’s world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer. ‘It is the naked honesty of Myerson’s prose that makes her work so compelling, and this novel stands as her most impressively realised work to date-Myerson has a forensic interest in the messiness of grief, which she itemises with the awful clarity of vision that often accompanies shock’ Guardian
What We Think
Julie Myerson on her book Something Might Happen:
‘This town really is a safe place, everyone knows that. Even in winter, even after dark, it’s a place where once a kid knows how to cross a road safely, they can pretty much go around alone.’
It’s always hard to say exactly what inspires a novel – so many different layers drifting and settling – but two things stand out.
Many years ago now, Rachel Nickell was stabbed on Wimbledon Common, not far from where I live in South London, and I remember feeling, as everyone did, horrified and stunned at the pure randomness of it. The idea that one moment a young mother could be out walking in the sunshine with her toddler and her dog – in a place where she should expect to feel safe – and the next moment a handful of lives were devastated and changed. The mother in me was appalled, grief-stricken. The writer in me couldn’t help imagining that day and the days after. How did that day begin? What did they eat for breakfast? What were her last words to her husband? How did he get the news?
Writers do that – they can’t help it. Maybe as a way of dealing with an event in our heads, we imagine our way around it, put ourselves as far as we dare into that other person’s shoes. In this case, though, I didn’t dare. I found thinking about the Nickell case almost intolerable.
But a few years went by and inevitably other similar murders haunted the press. And I became interested in two things: the way the papers report on such an event, the way grief and shock affect a town, the tragi-comic inevitability of the way locals always say the same things – ‘we are a nice peaceful community, we never could have imagined such a thing could happen here….’
At the same time, I happened to begin reviewing films for a national newspaper and found myself horrified at the way Hollywood so often uses brutal murder as a tool to stimulate and entertain. I found myself resenting the way the violence was softened and glamorised, the way the cops always caught the baddie. Real life was not like that. I was struck by how in reality murder cases remain unsolved – or else the killer turns out to be someone unlinked to the victim. Murder is more often than not random, banal, dull, appalling. OK, that may not on the face of it make such a good story, but I felt passionately that fiction concerned with murder should reflect that. It should horrify, yes, but it should offer no easy resolutions and, even more importantly, no cheap thrills.
Meanwhile, I was spending more and more time with my three children in a sleepy seaside town in Suffolk called Southwold. I love this place. Its significance to me is deep and many-layered. It’s the first place I ever went on holiday to as a child – and it’s barely changed since 1968. My eight-year-old self still haunts these quiet streets, the teashops, the shingle beach, the sloping greens. I also love it because it feels like a safe place. There’s very little crime there, life is lived at a slow and trusting pace. It’s the only place in the world where I feel safe to walk alone, in the dark.
As a mother I really appreciated that when we were in Southwold I could let my kids run free, they could experience the same independence that I’d enjoyed, growing up in the country. But the writer in me began to wonder something altogether darker: what if I set a novel here? What if I wanted to write about the idea of safety, the shock of random violence? What if I took this quiet, safe place that I love so much and imagined something truly appalling happening here … what then?