Book Review

By Derryll White

Hill, Susan (2010). The Shadows In the Street.

This is the fifth novel in Susan Hill’s Detective Chief Simon Serrailler series. Hill has a very special and sensitive way of conveying a clear sense of British village life – not London but the small rural village gathered close around a prominent Church of England cathedral. She catches the rhythm and the closeness of the women living there, the distinct character and quirks of that semi-cloistered existence. She does, however, let the 21st Century in with spreading drugs and prostitution in that same village.

As usual, Susan Hill takes on a number of social issues. With heart and soul bared, she examines the social conditions that put young women on the street selling themselves. And she takes pains to make them human, not harlots but single moms providing for their kids, not whores but people who have surrendered to years of abuse and neglect and who are simply using the only remaining skills they have. There is a lot of empathy here for those who, but for fortune, might be any of us.

Hill also puts mental illness under the lens – not usually a dysfunctional condition but one which can often be successfully managed with select medication. She offers some insights into the debilitating aspects of medicated life.

The book drills deeply into the frustrations of police work – the stress and pressure of a major homicide investigation. Hill is thorough and the over picture that emerges shows that homicide work is not for everyone. But, as always, Susan Hill employs her characters to examine and present the intricacies of every-day life, how people interact and rely on one another. She is at her strongest when examining the link, the bond that women forge with one another out of need. It is really quite wonderful.

I always get a lot from a Susan Hill novel. She gives me many things to think about, and perhaps change, in my own behaviour. I gladly recommend ‘The Shadows in the Street’ to anyone who wants to think about the community they live in in a new and different light.

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Excerpts from the novel:

GRIEF – Bereavement, she had discovered, was about many things, but one of those, and the one which few people seemed to know or warn about, was a long-lasting, overwhelming physical and mental tiredness. Even now, a year after Chris’s death, she felt exhausted for much of the time, with an exhaustion that seemed to be bone-deep and to bear no relation to whatever else she might have been doing or even to how much sleep she got.

RELIGION – “Loosely, Stephen Webber is evangelical – Charismatic – what my mother would have called Low Church and I call happy-clappy. I dare say it has its place – but that place is not at St. Michael’s or any other of our great cathedrals which have a tradition of excellence in liturgy and music. That’s what cathedrals are about – excellence.

MOOD DISORDERS – …somehow, in the periods between, when she was taking the medication which balanced her moods, he forgot – sometimes even forgot that her mental condition was a permanent one. The drugs worked. They were stabilising, and she had gone for as long as two and a half years without deciding to stop taking them. Whenever she did so it was a few weeks of slow change, which went unnoticed until she tipped over the edge, into mania.

JOB CENTRE – The downturn had hit everywhere, there was nothing for skilled people unless they were in IT and even those jobs were getting thin on the ground. Geoff got his tea and looked around him, thinking of how much training and skills and education were probably packed into this café right now, and all of it going to waste. How could you tell your kids to stay on at school, do their best, achieve, give up this and that so they could have a great future, when they’d got this place to point to and call you wrong?

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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