Before I Go to Sleep - film review

S.J. Watson's bestselling debut novel Before I Go to Sleep must have been a challenging book to adapt for film. Rowan Joffe took on the job a couple of years ago, and I think he made a good job of it, rather better than one or two reviews I've read suggest. And the key to the success of the film, for me, was the small but superlative cast. It was also very sensible (as it usually is) to keep the running time short - slightly over an hour and a half.

Nicole Kidman is Christine, the woman who keeps waking up to the nightmarish reality that she can't remember anything about her life. Each day, she has to be reminded by Colin Firth that he is Ben, her husband, and that some years back, she suffered a terrible accident which caused her to lose her memory. But it soon emerges that it was no accident. She was attacked by someone in a hotel.

She receives daily calls from a doctor, played by Mark Strong, who says he is trying to help her to recover her memory. But it soon becomes clear that he is attracted to her. What exactly are his motives? Can she trust Ben? And what part in her life was played by a friend called Claire (Anne-Marie Duff)?.

I've seen Nicole Kidman excel in a number of different roles; here, she is quite outstanding. Firth and Strong both have a powerful presence on the screen, and the combination works very well. Even though I'd read the book, I found myself gripped from start to finish. Definitely worth watching..

Before We Met - Lucie Whitehouse - review

Before We Met is a widely acclaimed psychological suspense novel by Lucie Whitehouse that was published not long ago. In the wake of all the publicity about the films of Gone Girl and Before I Go to Sleep., I decided to try another book in broadly the same field. Unlike Gone Girl, however, but like Louise Millar's Accidents Happen, Before We Met is set in England (apart from a few flashback scenes in the US).

I'm a fan of psychological suspense, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who is sorry that Minette Walters has not been very productive of late. Her The Sculptress is one of my all-time favourites in this genre. I also very much enjoyed A Likeness in Stone by Julia  Wallis Martin, another excellent novelist who has sadly been absent from the scene for quite a while. Nicci French, too, has moved away from superb stand-alones to the greater orthodoxy of a series. There's no shortage of other writers working in the same field, and achieving similar success. Sophie Hannah, to name but one - even though, interestingly, she has just digressed into the very different world of Hercule Poirot.

In Lucie Whitehouse's book, Hannah is a young woman who seems to have it all. She's recently married Mark,a wealthy businessman, who is devoted to her, and although she's not found a new job since marriage brought her back home from the States, that is surely only a question of time. But one day she goes to meet Mark at the airport - and he doesn't show up. What has happened, and is her lovely marriage all it seemed? No prizes, I'm afraid, for guessing the answer to the second question.

I was interested that Whitehouse chose to tell her story in the third rather than the first person. This risks some loss of immediacy, but I found the first half of the book gripping. Once one particular secret was revealed, I felt the story became relatively conventional, and certainly more orthodox than the best-sellers by Gillian Flynn and S. J. Watson, but it's still a decent read from start to finish. .

Before I Go To Sleep

Before I Go To Sleep, by S.J. Watson, is a first novel that has achieved stunning success, winning awards and earning massive sales. My paperback edition is festooned with superlative-laden comments from reviews and other authors. Tess Gerritsen even goes so far as to say it is the best debut novel she has ever read – a large claim, to put it mildly.

Yet there is a minority view that the book is over-rated. Maxine Clarke, aka Petrona, wrote this critical but typically thoughtful and considered review, and others have also expressed serious doubts about the plausibility of the plot-line.

When I took this book away with me on holiday, I was aware of both the hype and the criticisms, but I wanted to read it with an open mind. It’s a novel of psychological suspense, written by a man but told from the point of view of a woman, and it sits very much in the territory marked out by the likes of Nicci French and Sophie Hannah – essentially a modern update of the “woman in jeopardy” thriller. The subject is amnesia, and the related issue of the fallibility of memory – familiar themes in crime fiction. So the basic elements are perhaps unoriginal, but I thought that Watson’s treatment of them seemed fresh and full of energy.

I was gripped by this book from start to finish. There is no doubt that there are plot flaws, many of which Maxine has pointed out, and I understand and sympathise with her reservations – which are, again characteristically, expressed in a very fair way. What is more, I think it’s absolutely reasonable to judge such a successful book by the toughest standards – tougher than those applied to less celebrated efforts, for sure.

That said, most crime novels contain elements that are, to say the least, improbable. Ultimately, a key subjective question for judgment is whether an author succeeds in overcoming the inherent unlikelihood of the material and exciting the reader. Well, I was excited, and I did want to know what was going to happen to poor old Christine and her enigmatic husband Ben. You need to suspend your disbelief when reading, but I was happy to do so.