The Boat by Clara Salaman

The Boat by Clara Salaman
Buy The Boat by Clara Salaman at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Zoe Page
Summary: A romantic honeymoon turns sinister when a young couple, in need of rescuing, find out the truth about their saviours.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 368	Date: January 2014
Publisher: Head of Zeus
ISBN: 978-1781855843
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This is a book that starts at the end, which saddened me a little. Sometimes it’s hard to get lost in the mystery of a story when you know how it ends. But a mystery this story is. Johnny and Clem are Brits abroad, traveling through Europe, sticking to the coast where the boats are. Johnny’s into all things nautical and as boat people, we understood this. The title is the first thing that caught my eye on this book, and the reason I picked it up. And it’s no lie: the vast majority of this book is set not just on boats generally, but on one specific boat. The Boat. It belongs to another expat couple, Frank and Annie, whose life is a series of ports and harbours, and they come to Johnny and Clem’s aid when they need it most.

This is a story where things are not what they seem but by the time you realise this it’s too late, and you are, quite literally, stranded out at sea. Frank is a personable man with an enviable life, but what is he running away from? Surely no one chooses to give up their nice, normal life for a life of uncertainty and spontaneity, going wherever the wind takes you? As the couples bond and the boat moves further away from civilisation, the narrative takes a dark turn I didn’t see coming, and changes from a story of young love to one of murder, suicide, child abuse and other disturbing images. I’m not often shocked by books, but this one left an odd feeling in my stomach, even without explicit descriptions. I think it was the detachment with which some of the activities were discussed, making them more emotive precisely because of the lack of emotion.

Neither of our boats is a sail boat, so some of the detail was lost of me, but the superstitions rang true, like never changing the name of a boat. Wiki confirms there’s truth in what Clem says about never leaving port on a Friday too, though this one had otherwise escaped my notice. The setting of a boat is vital as it gives a great sense of being temporarily stranded without them all being on an island they needed to find their way off, and as the secrets become bigger, the small size of their surroundings suddenly seems unbearably claustrophobic.

This book was very slow initially and I was wondering if there was any point to it. The turning point came around Smudge’s birthday, however, and from that quite late point on I was hooked and found it hard to put down. It’s an uncomfortable read at times, but I liked that in a way because it was a departure from my usual safe reads. It’s a travel book with a difference, because land visits are few and far between, and when they do come the details aren’t spectacular, leaving the towns and villages quite indistinguishable.

Clem and Johnny are interesting characters and the way their relationship develops during the book was one of the things that kept my interest because it was neither your everyday honeymoon story nor a typical story about a couple growing up and growing apart. Annie was a take her or leave her lady in my mind, but Frank, for all his past, was quite intriguing, especially the effect he had on Johnny.

This is not a book I would really want to read again, because it would be hard to forget enough of the key details to make discovering them again an enjoyable (or at times quite the opposite) experience, but I am glad I finished it because of the end of the ending (which don’t forget is also the beginning).

Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

The same author also offers us Shame on You while The Beach by Alex Garland is the same style and approach as The Boat

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