Gone Girl

Book Review

Title: Gone Girl

Author: Gillian Flynn

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2012

Pages: 466

This is a masterpiece. It makes you laugh a lot, especially in the early pages. Then it fills you with awe; awe at the complexity of the two main characters: Nick Dunne and his wife Amy Elliott Dunne. As you move to the final section, it terrifies you.

This novel is a thriller. Amy Elliott Dunne has vanished. All evidence points to Nick Dunne as the murderer though Amy’s body is not found. There is her diary and a lot more that put Nick in the dock. The whole story is told by Nick and Amy in alternate chapters. And they are amazing narrators. Both are writers, after all. Nick was a journalist writing TV and movie reviews. Amy’s specialisation was making personality quizzes for magazines. Both lost their jobs due to the Recession in 2009 and so they move to Nick’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri, where Nick opens a bar with his sister Margo. He also finds a job as a teacher of journalism which gets him entangled with a young and beautiful – and immature too – student, Andie.

Did Nick murder Amy in order to live with Andie? Is Amy dead at all, in the first place? Both Nick and Amy are very intriguing and complex characters. When we meet them in the initial pages of the novel, they are two jobless grown-ups who spend weeks wandering around their “Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice crem at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps.”

Soon we see their true colours in all their possible shades. The plot becomes not just suspenseful but clever. Terribly and terrifyingly clever. You begin to be amazed by the intellect of the novelist. If I tell you more about that intellect, this review will be a spoiler. I would like you to read the book and relish it. Relish its bizarre humour, insights into human psychology, the intricacies of a criminal mind, and the dreadful ironies of human life.

I quoted a few lines from this novel in an earlier post and Blogger flagged that post. I shall keep this review chaste if only to follow “Blogger’s community guidelines.”