Fiction/Eileen Battersby: A local woman disappears. It is very strange. The seaside town is small and friendly, a real community, well able to deal with the summer visitors, who don't have much of an impact and are quickly forgotten. But Lennie is found dead, viciously murdered.
Her heart has been ripped out. Julie Myerson's dramatic narrative is less a thriller, less a mystery than might be expected considering there is a murder, a mutilated corpse, no reasons, no killer. Instead she makes clear that this is a story about the way things might happen - and do.
Everything is seen through the eyes of Lennie's best friend, Tess, a weary mother of three who is still getting used to a fourth child, the new baby that came as a surprise. She and her husband Mick work hard at being good parents and at living good lives. They seem tired but happy and then with the news of Lennie's horrific death, their small world begins to fall apart.
Myerson's terrifying fifth novel operates as a master-class in storytelling. Nothing fancy, lots of facts and detail, a hefty collection of clues. Who did it? And why? Was it Alex , Lennie's offbeat husband, a bit of a weirdo, or perhaps he only seems manic because he is obviously obsessed with Tess, with whom he was once involved. Could Lennie really have been as wonderful as everyone claims? What about that odd young fellow Darren? Is he telling lies or is there some truth in the stories?
Tess is no saint, she is angry and tired. Her three older children are obviously affected by the killing. Lennie was so close, she was family. The police move into town and set up their investigation unit. The murder is the sole topic of conversation, but there is something else as well - there is this new thing, fear.
Alex begins acting even more oddly. Details begin to come out, it is he who informs the police that on the night of the killing, he had visited Tess in her little beach hut. Another man enters their lives. Lacey is there to ease people through grief. Is he another investigator? He becomes very interested in Tess who has begun to drift through time, her house is a mess, her routines are no longer the support they had been.
Myerson looks to the ordinary. Her characters are used to life as it is. Suddenly, one vicious deed initiates a complex series of upheavals. This is a taut, tactile book, the words as uttered by Tess in her urgent narrative are charged with intent. She sees with the surreal clarity of a person about to collapse, as indeed she finally does, on the stone floor of the local church.
Throughout the narrative, Myerson, a candid, humane writer who favours a tough, non-literary approach, examines the appalling reality that no tragedy can deflect the relentlessness of life going on. Tess is in turmoil, it has taken this crisis for her own turmoil and unease to float to the surface. She is practical, blunt and believable, an ordinary woman, an ordinary person with an ordinary set of resentments and dreams. Myerson is careful and sustains the consistency of Tess's personality.
After a conservation with her young daughter Rosa, Tess decides "Our lives are all around us. That's what I know now. The beginnings and the ends of them, some wrapped tight, pulsing, unknowable - others floating free. Time is a made-up thing. Everything happens at once. I know that now. It's all the same - life, death and life again. Children know this. That's why they complain if you make them wait for anything. Waiting is a dead time, nothing time, they know that. Waiting is a punishment, finally over when the moment comes."
It is one of the few passages in which Tess reflects on a more abstract level, elsewhere she responds to the moment. Her dilemmas are presented to her almost by instinct as are her choices. Throughout the book, people touch, smell, feel, and most of all, react. Tough, compromising and honest, Something Might Happen is dark and relentless, it is also one of the best British novels of the year.
As with Tim Parks in Judge Savage, Myerson has allowed people to make their choices and mistakes and to live with the consequences. Not quite a thriller, it is more than a thriller, more than a story, it is a stark, atmospheric and quasi-confessional look at life as lived.
Something Might Happen By Julie Myerson Jonathan Cape, 328 pp, £12.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times