Review by New York Times Review
MELANIE FINN'S SECOND novel, "The Gloaming," sends prosperous Westerners to eerie, treacherous Africa. Miraculously, Finn avoids every cliché about first- versus third-world problems. In this richly textured, intricately plotted novel, she assures us that heartbreak has the same shape everywhere - especially if it involves the grief of losing a child. Thirty-two-year-old Pilgrim Jones (the name courtesy of hippie parents) is an American who lives an idyllic life in small-town Switzerland until her husband, a world-renowned human rights lawyer, leaves her for another woman. Pilgrim had believed her marriage proudly and happily childless, so she's stunned when her ex immediately starts a family with his new wife. Things get m uch worse when Pilgrim kills three children in a car accident and she's ostracized in her town. Attempting an African safari as an escape, she abruptly decides to leave the group and, numb and brittle, finds herself alone in Tanzania, coping with "the intense vertigo of a totally blank future." The novel's chapters alternate between Switzerland at the time of the accident and the tiny Tanzanian town of Magulu, where Pilgrim lands, seemingly at random: "It could be that I have nowhere to go, so I am here." In Switzerland, a kindly detective tries to help her come to terms with the car crash - and falls in love with her as he confronts the common cold of first-world problems, an unhappy marriage. In Tanzania, Pilgrim meets a policeman without any tools to enforce social order, a sociopathic Ukrainian mercenary and an American divorcée who is trying to set up an orphanage for children with AIDS. All turn out to be haunted by their own tragedies involving children, struggling with guilt or an unquenchable desire for retribution. Born in Kenya, Finn lived in Tanzania while helping to film the nature documentary "The Crimson Wing," and she demonstrates an insider's command of the terrain. "The Gloaming" is chillingly cinematic in contrasting East Africa's exquisite landscape with the region's human needs - not just the hungry children in rags torturing dogs for entertainment but the makeshift nature of a society in which doctors have scant access to drugs and even the mortuary has no electricity, so corpses must be stored in a fish factory. "When you understand this country," a Tanzanian doctor warns Pilgrim, "you know you cannot ever understand it." The climate may be scorching, but Finn's prose is cool and precise. Evocative as her descriptions are of sunlight, "hot and white and unrelenting as a strobe," and labyrinthine caves where people get lost and die, she doesn't linger; her plot has real momentum. After the arrival of a box of body parts from a murdered albino, the grisly evidence of a traditional curse, everyone suspects it was intended for Pilgrim, although she has shared nothing about her past. When Pilgrim disappears, the novel jump cuts to the people who converge in Africa seeking to either hurt or help her. In sorting through their motives, "The Gloaming" delivers a searing taxonomy of loss, and shows the way it leads to a cycle of violence. By the novel's surprising end, Finn even sheds light on the motives of sadistic rebels who laconically announce they're about to kill a victim - then demand a tip to make the death painless. Early on, Pilgrim's husband, who has spent his career sorting through files of atrocities, tells her that "violence becomes an identity, how people see themselves in the world, and to ask them to stop being violent is to ask them to erase themselves." Yet even in a malevolent setting, Finn shows us acts of selflessness and redemption. Her fascination with the duality of Africa - "the most honest place on earth" - shines fiercely. LISA ZEIDNER'S most recent novel is "Love Bomb." She teaches creative writing in the M.F.A. program at Rutgers University-Camden.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her second novel, Finn (Away from You) follows divorcée Pilgrim Jones from her privileged life in Switzerland to the wilds of Tanzania, offering a dark, wrenching story of loneliness, guilt, and life after tragedy. Abandoned by her international lawyer husband, Tom Lankester, for a mousy mutual acquaintance, Elise, Pilgrim struggles to regain her balance. Distracted by Tom's betrayal, she causes an accident in the Swiss town of Arnau in which three schoolchildren are killed. Although cleared of any charges with the support of Detective Inspector Paul Strebel, Pilgrim, wracked with guilt and tormented by the accusations of the locals, seeks a fresh start in the remote Tanzanian village of Magulu. Pilgrim's desire to live-alone-in such a place is unusual, and her presence piques the interest of Dorothea, the flamboyant local doctor, and Kessy, "a policeman without laws" who patrols the desolate no-man's-land. As she gains familiarity with her surroundings, moving from village to village, Pilgrim comes to understand that none of the expats she meets is without baggage: not the sociopathic Ukrainian mercenary Martin Martins, nor grieving mother-cum-aid-worker Gloria, nor the skilled, damaged pilot Harry. The arrival of a macabre package-the remains of an albino man, said to contain a powerful curse-only implicate Pilgrim further in the mysteries of Tanzania. Finn's sure-footed prose, an intricate, clever plot, and the novel's powerful examination of cultural divides enrich this story, leading up to its shocking, brilliant conclusion as Pilgrim and the others search for salvation in an unforgiving land. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this intent and unexpectedly suspenseful work, Pilgrim Jones has devotedly followed her husband as he attends to his various NGO duties, mainly in Africa, only to be abandoned for another woman in the Swiss village where they are living. But here she doesn't play the role of stereotypically to-be-pitied wife, having accidentally fatally struck three children when she drives away in anger after discovering yet another betrayal; Finn (Away from You) skillfully and uncomfortably makes her guilt and disquiet the reader's as well. Pilgrim lands in Africa, making herself useful by carrying away the cursed remains of an albino African from the scrubby village where she was staying to the Tanzanian port city of Tanga. There, she falls in with a brassy expat and is eventually trapped in a plot for vengeance more twisty and real than a lot of domestic thrillers could manage. VERDICT An embracingly and impeccably written study of one woman's anguish; highly recommended. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
