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Writer's ReviewLincolnshire Echo, 6 April 2004Novelist Stephan Collishaw, recently named as one of the top 20 young British writers by the British Council, tells us what he thinks of fellow Nottingham-based author Clare Littleford's latest paperback release Death Duty.Stephan Collishaw's own book, The Last Girl, is published by Sceptre. His forthcoming novel, Amber, will be published in July.When Jo Elliot, a young female social worker, is mugged in broad daylight in a Nottingham shop, she, like everybody else, assumes it was a random attack. As time passes, however, Jo begins to suspect that it was not so indiscriminate after all, begins to suspect that somebody is watching her, following her, toying with her. There is a break-in at her house, she sees faces in shop windows and all the time, somewhere at the back of her head the memory of a voice lingers. Her attacker had said something to her before he hit her so hard across the skull, she just can't quite remember what. He was familiar, but she just can't place from where she knew him. He, though, is going to make sure she never forgets again. Clare Littleford's second novel deals with fear, the debilitating, uncontrollable fear that lurks just beneath the surface of our calm civilised lives, revealed only when life twists momentarily from its habitual path, out of our control. Set, like her first novel Beholden, in Nottingham, it once again faithfully recreates the grimier edges of the city. Kids, hoods pulled low over their faces, sit on walls drinking beer. Streets are dark and empty and in half-empty pubs old men sit smoking roll-ups, drinking themselves into oblivion. Littleford is excellent at building up the tension, ratcheting up the fear not by throwing in violent incident but by gradually isolating her narrator, putting her into a more and more vulnerable situation. But the writing becomes even more atmospheric as the action moves away from the city to a small caravan site on the east coast, north of Skegness. 'Beyond the shuttered seafront kiosks, the sky was a dirty grey mass of rolling clouds, imitating the swell and froth of the sea.' As the novel careers towards its bloody denouement it's impossible to guess how it will end and while the reader grips the book, horrified by the stupidity of the naive young social worker, Littleford is cleverly engineering the final twist, which, as all good twists should, both surprises us completely while seeming to be totally obvious retrospectively. Death Duty is particularly adept at describing the vulnerability of young women in today's cities, and ruthlessly tearing away our comfortable delusions of safety. It will have you twitching your curtains when darkness falls. It will have you waking in the night, ears cocked to the sounds in the darkness, reaching for the kitchen knife you have slipped beneath your pillow. |
