“The year Peter went missing was the year of the floods.” Thus begins this tale from Andrea (Andy) set in the present-day but reaching back twenty years to the summer of 1996 when she and her friends have finished their final exams. A bored teenager with few prospects, Andy enriches her life by coming up with games to play with her three best friends: Peter, Marcus and Em. The guardrails come off when Andy’s alcoholic mother predicts the apocalypse is about to occur—if the world is ending, their actions have no consequences—and the four friends take over an empty manor house near Marlborough in Wiltshire.
Learning that a valuable diamond necklace had been stolen at the manor fifty years earlier and never recovered, they embark on a new game of playing detective. Em acquires a cheap copy of the necklace—a tourist item in town—and they take turns hiding it, a game that has the added relish of perhaps actually finding the real necklace and changing their lives. Another teen, the suspiciously charismatic David, turns up one day, claiming to be a friend of the absent owners and quickly becomes a part of the group.
Yet there’s an ominous push-pull within the group as they practice deceiving one another. Relationships fray; secrets and lies erode trust; betrayals lurk in the shadows. The story builds gradually, moving between the search for Peter in the present and unpacking the events of the past, turning them this way and that, looking at them anew.
Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys – an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door are a thousand other doors.
I was drawn to this novel because I like the narrator of the audiobook, Kristin Atherton, and because a reviewer compared it to Tana French’s work. My favorite is The Likeness of which I said, “French captures so well the fun of being part of a tight group of friends, when you’re young, and it’s all happening for the first time, and everything seems unbearably sweet.” Gosling’s story comes at youthful friendship from another angle, capturing its mystery and beauty, but also its fragility and fear.
To sleep on? Or to wake? This was the question facing me. To sleep, or to wake and face the reckoning, to find out what had been lost.
I thought Before the Ruins would be another in a long line of gothic mysteries about a narrator revisiting formative events in the past, secrets that come to light, etc. However, I underestimated the book. It rewards deeper investigation, from the pun in the title (before) to the use of diamonds as a MacGuffin to the sly use of imagery (floods, treasure, playing games, losing your nerve at the prospect of a leap).
Caught up in the story I noticed little else, but on reflection I wish we could have gotten to know the characters other than Andy a bit better. The way they are presented makes sense since we are getting the story through her point of view which comes with her own blinders; only near the end do their actions indicate more complexity. I would also have welcomed more description of the manor itself.
As a writer, several things in this book impressed me: the complexity of the narrative with multiple storylines and reveal after reveal; Gosling’s willingness to let the slow burn unfold in sentence after delicious sentence; and the way she hits the reader flat out near the end, signaling that whatever you thought the theme was, it’s so much more. No spoilers here, but be prepared to discover layers upon unexpected layers of this story.
Have you read a novel that turned out to be much more than you expected?