Julia Plummer joins the ranks of troubled women with dark pasts who have been patrolling the pages of the bestseller charts. Gone Girl. The Girl on the Train. Apple Tree Yard. The Crooked House. In this incarnation, our domestic noir protagonist lives in north London, comfortably married to a surgeon, Hugh, 10 years her senior. She has a son, Connor, whom she adopted as a toddler when his mother, her teenage sister, couldn’t cope. She doesn’t work, but she earns “pin money” taking family photographs, a link to her past. Things are pretty good; there’s just a small niggle. Kate wants Connor back.
We are only pages into the novel when Julia – our narrator – learns that Kate has been murdered, in an alleyway in Paris. There are no leads, and when the police fail to move their investigation forwards, Julia takes matters into her own hands. Discovering that her sister used to meet men online for sex, Julia decides to enter this murky world herself, to find out if any of Kate’s old hook-ups knows more than he should.
The aptly titled and much-anticipated Second Life is the second novel from SJ Watson, the man who brought us Before I Go to Sleep, an utterly original thriller based on the premise that its central character’s memories are lost every time she goes to sleep. It was brilliant: so simple a concept that it seemed impossible it hadn’t been done before; so entirely gripping and disturbing, as Christine discovered, time and again, that the man lying beside her was her husband, and that he couldn’t be trusted. It became a huge bestseller.
How to follow such a critical, commercial hit? Well, Watson gives us another woman mired in confusion and dishonesty, slowly peeling back the layers of her past. Julia’s first life comes to light bit by bit – her alcoholism and addictive personality, the years she spent with a wild crowd in Berlin before Hugh gave her middle-class respectability. And her present, her second life, starts to crumble, vertiginously quickly, as her involvement with someone she meets online spirals wildly out of control, and it becomes increasingly clear that he is not what he seems.
Watson does certain things extremely well in Second Life: Julia’s struggle with alcoholism (“Ride it out. Ride it out,” she tells herself as the desire for drink hits her) is quietly perceptive. Her need to be noticed, to be special, and how, coupled with her addictive tendencies, this becomes a dangerous, unstoppable cyber-relationship, is simultaneously believable and terrifying. “As I open [the message] I get the strangest feeling. A plunging, a descent. A door has been nudged open. Something is coming.”
And his portrayal of the dark side of internet relationships, how their tendrils can spread to every aspect of life in the real world, is horrifying. “Anyone can find a decent picture of themselves, anyone can present themselves in the best light. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do, on some level? Show our best face to the world, leave the darkness within? The screen of the internet just makes it easier.”
It’s a shame, then, that Second Life’s ending is bizarre and unsatisfying – perhaps Watson is a victim of his own brilliance, given how successfully he wrapped up his debut, but this time round, the ends remain loose. For all that, once the novel gets going – and it takes a while – it is an edgy, disturbing read. And let’s face it, there aren’t many authors who could top Before I Go to Sleep.
Second Life is published by Doubleday, £14.99. Click here to order a copy for £11.99
