Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
Seeping with darkness, pulsing with dread and jagged as barbed wire, Gone Girl delves deep into the trenches of a very twisted marriage. A compelling and sharp-edged psychological thriller, Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel grapples with the manipulations, games and lies that go on in relationships, and asks the chilling question: how well can you ever really know another person’s mind?
On Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears. There are signs of a struggle, traces of blood hastily cleaned up, and enough strange clues for the police to suspect Nick of murder. Friends of Amy’s start coming forward, saying she was afraid of Nick, that she had bought a gun. And though Nick isn’t exactly acting like someone who just killed his wife, he isn’t acting like a distraught husband either.
The story unfolds in a constant game of he-said, she-said, and it’s never clear who we should trust or believe. Amy’s diary entries – from the day she met Nick, through to the day she vanishes – are interspersed with Nick’s account of the weeks following the disappearance. As layers of lies and deceit are peeled away, we start to piece together just how toxic their marriage really is beneath its shimmery veneer. Then, just when we seem to have a grasp on the truth, an outrageous twist changes everything.
By playing Nick and Amy’s perspectives against one another, Flynn pulls our sympathies back and forth, achieving the strange feat of making us care about –or at least be interested in – two characters who are not at all easy to like. Amy is cold and callously vindictive; Nick is smug and self-absorbed, with a sneering misogynistic streak. Deciding who is the villain in this story is not a straightforward task, and it may come down to a question of who you dislike the least.
Flynn’s masterful pacing creates a palpable feeling of dread, which bleeds through to the landscape and setting. Once the ultimate hipster couple in Brooklyn, Nick and Amy have returned to Nick’s dreary Missouri hometown, living in a soulless McMansion by the Mississippi. Descriptions of the cold flow of the river and the dark, leaky sky add to the sense of uneasiness, creating the perfect backdrop for the tense, nail-biting drama that plays out.
There are plenty reasons why everyone is talking about this book – Gone Girl is smart and captivating, drawing you deep into its dark and gritty world. This is one thriller that will satisfy literary aficionados and readers after an absorbing holiday novel alike.