Changes

|title=Too Close to the Edge

|author=Pascal Garnier and Emily Boyce (translator)

|date=April 2016

|isbn=9781910477250

Meet Pascal Garnier. Normally, in starting a review that way, I'm on about the main character of the book, but it could be said the biggest character of any Pascal Garnier book is Pascal Garnier, not that that's a flaw. Over a half-dozen titles I've come to know the pattern of his output, and it's fair to say this example fits it very well. Again, not a fault. His thrillers have a small cast list of characters, trapped somehow in a small community, cut off by weather, season or remoteness. Here we are with Eliette, and just a handful of others, and watching her as she celebrates the return of spring to her remote home, an ex-silk farm in southern France. All characters have a darkness about them, including Eliette – she had wanted to retire to the place with her loving, long-term husband, but he died of cancer months before retirement. And the final piece of the Garnier pattern is that that darkness, the black surrounding the night stars to use one of the more memorable lines here, is that things – said situation, other people, life itself – cause people to do some equally black and stupid acts…

That said, I've yet to meet a bad Garnier book. Once again he dresses his prose with no flourishes of style, favouring the blunt and matter-of-fact, but in a way that he does not dwell on evil actions or consequences and make the books hard to stomach, which they could well be given a different approach. This early work (his fourth of about sixteen adult novels, which he managed to fit in along with seven books of shorts and almost two score young readers, all in just 25 years of a truncated career) has all the galling inexorability of his regular works, which routinely defy the description 'regular'. Here you will not finish this without having met with at least one or two surprises, and the strongest, most pleasurable flavour in your mouth provided by the author's usual 'je ne sais quoi'.

[[Hester and Harriet by Hilary Spiers]] is definitely more how the British do this kind of thing.