Book review: Scenes From a Tragedy by Carole Hailey

Rajvi Glasbrook Griffiths

If Carole Hailey was in any way apprehensive about her ‘difficult second novel’, it is not possible to spot. The writing in ‘Scenes from a Tragedy’ fizzes with quietly charming confidence and control.

Whilst her first novel, ‘The Silence Project’, was a fictional memoir, ‘Scenes From a Tragedy’ takes the form of fictional true-crime. It is a text playfully aware of its own textuality: ‘If this was a twisty psychological thriller,’ Hailey’s character Carly writes, ‘then a reader might be presented with several questions – Who? How? Why?’. And the authorial stall is set early: this will be a story built on the ‘why’.

Part reportage, part medical notes, part narrative, a scandal in the sky leads to much investigation on earth, and what follows is the piecing together of all that is needed to understand, ‘Why would a. perfectly functioning plane hit a mountain?’

Suspense

The three main characters – Carly, Izzy and Grace – are as much character as device, as their differing perspectives and interactions with each other, in every combination, propel the novel. Each exchange takes us closer to unearthing why a passenger plane without any passengers crashes and kills its two pilots. At all times, Hailey doesn’t drop a stitch in keeping up the tautness of compulsive uncertainty and suspense: ‘Was she telling the truth about lying or was she lying about lying?’

‘Every family has a bad seed,’ reads the sleek cover, and in this instance it becomes clear very early on that Izzy is indeed that seed. What unfolds more gradually is that she is not just ‘bad’ but chillingly manipulative, wicked, and amoral (the kind of summative but shallow triple-listing of which Izzy herself would approve). She is a character governed by selfishness entirely indifferent to any conventional notion of morality, a kind of Villanelle crossed with Gone Girl. Izzy is a psychopath. She is, quite frankly, terrifying, and not least because she is also irresistible.

Mendacious

It is this mix, with its potential to poison the lives of all around, which Hailey executes with authority. Her research into psychopathy, especially in women, and the ways in which it can shape shift into forms as varied as charm, allure, abuse and control is acute precisely because the reader is aware of them being rooted in psychological reality.

There are unwritten intimations at theories of inherited psychopathy, and in that light even the relatively minor character of Izzy and Daniel’s Nan – flirtatious, gambling, chronically mendacious – takes on a curious hue. We are also left wondering at the end whether we should be concerned for Grace’s daughter, Beth, before we shake our heads of that thought.

Unputdownable

The matter of ‘ghost flights’ in the background, as both cause and scandal, is another layer to the story and no small aside. Most readers will likely learn for the first time of hundreds of thousands of flights making empty-plane journeys between airports during the Covid-19 period for no purpose other than to satisfy contractual obligations with landing slots at airports. It is impossible to gauge the environmental impact of such a stitch-up between vested parties. Here, the facts of it are spotlighted with importance.

It is no mean feat to have issues as weighty as psychopathy sit along lifting the lid on misdemeanours in aviation law as part of a captivatingly unputdownable novel. To this end, Carole Hailey’s voice seems a key part of a recent handful of highly fresh, intelligent, sassy writing by female authors in which heavy themes and compulsive readability are ingeniously pleached. Think Abigail Dean, Asako Yuzuki and Eliza Clarke, amongst others. But the comparison largely stops there. Hailey’s richly smart style is her own. May there be much more to come.

Scenes From a Tragedy by Carole Hailey is published by Corvus, Atlantic Books. It is available from all good bookshops.