#Blogtour #Review - The Guests by Agnes Ravatn

The Guests
Agnes Ravatn (translated by Rosie Hedger)
Orenda Books, 18 January
Available as: PB, 208pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781913193584

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Guests to consider for review, and to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

The Guests is a magnificently twisty thriller, a tense, stressy piece but at the same time focussed on apparently mundane themes - a couple taking a few days' break from the kids to stay in a holiday cabin loaned by a wealthy acquaintance. I might be tempted to use the phrase "low stakes" as we aren't dealing here with murder, other crimes or desperate secrets from the past - except that, for the couple concerned, Karin and Kai, the stakes do turn out to be very high (though I won't say exactly how because, spoilers, sweetie).

Much of the joy of this story is in the central characters. Lawyer Karin is a middle aged woman, prone to worry and to self-recrimination - almost to a pathological extent as she's ready to admit to herself. She has some reason, as she slowly reveals, given earlier life events and in particular a bruising encounter in her teens with the mean girls at school. Whether this did actually impact the course of her life as much as she suggests, we can't know. Karin leaves out a lot so we are left to speculate on actions and consequences. To a degree Karin regards herself as an underachiever, and she puts much of the blame for that on her earlier life. To be thrust into the milieu of the super wealthy, people who it seems Karim frankly despises (though there may be envy here!) really narks her, tweaking all her insecurities.

What's clear as subsequent events then unfold is the importance of what happened before to Karin's own story of herself - and this book is all about the stories. Those we tell ourselves. Those we tell others close to us - partners, kids. Those we make up for strangers. Those we carefully construct for ourselves to make sense of the world around us and, in particular, of coincidences, chance events and unlikely overlaps.

Those last feature especially here and they're something that Karin - with her doom-laden sense of the past and its influence - is ill-equipped to cope with, so that at a key moment she's unable, literally unable, to be open and honest about something which then drives the narrative into a spiral of growing deception. This gives subsequent developments a darkly comic twist with Karin and her craftsman husband Kai pushed into an almost Wodehousian imbroglio in their attempt to sustain a charade. Alas, they aren't the only pretenders in this little coastal paradise and nothing is more certain than that lies will come back to bite their creators.

I hope that I'm not making The Guests sound over solemn - as well as exploring dark corners in a. relationship, it's also incredibly funny. Yes, Ravatn dissects the central relationship in an almost forensic style (appropriate given Karin's profession) but as well as sometimes making the reader squirm, that also brings to light the hilarious absurdities to be found in any life partnership. The reader will - well, I was - left both shaking my head at what was going on, almost begging Karin and Kai to extract themselves from the mess, and urging them on, eager to see just how messy things could get.

In summary this book - relatively short at just over 200 pages - packs in a great deal and shoes just how much can be done with apparently little (a restricted setting, few characters and, apparently, not a lot going on. Apparently). 

Rosie Hedger's translation is excellent, capturing Karin's somewhat brittle, always-close-panic internal monologue and the comings and goings of the other participants in this drama. All are vividly present in the reader's mind as the story unfolds.

For more information about The Guests, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Guests from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.