A review by frickative
Depths by Laurie Thompson, Henning Mankell

4.0

In an effort to introduce some variety into my reading material (Stephen King and crime fiction are fine - reading nothing but Stephen King and crime fiction is not so fine) I recently joined a book group through my local library. Depths is the first book I read for it, and for the first 50 pages or so, I was almost regretting joining. Almost. It's a weird book, that's for sure. It's stark, it's bleak, it's excessively detailed, and in places it's so minimalist that entire chapters are a single sentence long.

While the prologue is fantastically gripping, what follows it really wasn't, for me, until I settled into the style. The main character is obsessed with measurements, so there's a lot of intricate detail, plus an underlying tone of total despair. Yet by the final third of the book, I stopped having to force myself to read a set number of pages per day, and began racing through it of my own volition. It's a tough one to explain - the protagonist is a reprehensible excuse for a human being, there's no one and nothing to root for here, and yet it became highly compelling nonetheless.

It didn't help that around the mid-way point, I read a bizarre Guardian review that said the main character is a serial killer. He isn't. I spent the rest of the book waiting for this to be revealed. It wasn't.

All in all, I'd definitely be interested in checking out more of Mankell's work (I really must try some Wallander, resolution to read less crime fiction be damned) because there was some really beautiful prose here.