Bluff, by Francine Toon review: 'a very slick production'
Set in a thinly-fictionalised St Andrews, and concerning the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, Francine Toon’s new novel is perhaps a little too carefully engineered for its own good, writes Stuart Kelly
I am sure we all know the old adage about covers and not judging books thereupon, and am equally sure most of us know that it is nonsense. It is why publishers have design departments. An aside: I am terribly taken with Fitzcarraldo Editions and their austere Gallic blank covers, let alone the taste that means they publish writers like Ernaux, Tokarczuk and Latronico. It seems to insist that you are being treated as a grown-up.
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The cover of Francine Toon’s Bluff is not as restrained as a Fitzcarraldo publication, but it is clean and unfussy. A crag, with a flock of birds rising, all monochrome, but with the title centred in an elegant font and in blue, with the author’s name and “bestselling author of” above, in a lower point size. The endorsements are not hyperbolic. (One author friend confessed to me never to reading any novel where the author’s name was bigger than the title). So here is the first bluff if you like. This is packaged as a literary novel, when in fact it is a genre crime novel. A genre crime novel in the same subcategory as the late Ruth Rendell’s novels written as Barbara Vine or Sophie Hannah’s nasty psychological riddles. Toon has won the McIlvanney Prize and was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland debut prize, so it is surprising to pretend it isn’t crime.
The structure is one that I have seen more and more frequently. We have two distinct time frames – in this case, 2013 and 2023. The former is focalised on a female character, the latter on a male character; and more significantly the female character’s story is in the third person while the male character narrates in the first person. One could almost extrapolate a theory about agency in the novel from that simple fact. It begins, however, with an extract from “Who’s Afraid of the Dark”, a Higher English Reflective Essay by Joanie Sinclair – the subject of the third person sections – and these snippets serve to punctuate the tick-tock between the two styles. It is worth noticing that the essay was written in 2012 – these are the kinds of details that are always worth being shrewd about – so whatever we learn about Joanie in the subsequent chapters it is predicated upon some kind of story which happened before any of this began.
In 2013 Joanie has finished school, and is with her friends, boyfriend and general cohort on the beach in a small university town on the east coast of Fife called St Rule (“While it was true that St Rule thrived on ceremony and tradition, its existence was sustained by an economy of coffee houses, gloomy pubs and quaint bookshops. The places, in other words, where people spent their time between communion, lectures and the golf course.”) Of course this is St Andrews, and I hope that the unnecessary pseudonym is just a pedant repellent and not a skimp on research. It is not as if anything utterly un-St Andrews-like happens in “St Rule” that requires fictionalising. The end of term hi-jinks have included Joanie being filmed pretending to be dead (another bluff). The night ends badly for Joanie, as her boyfriend’s affections are not exclusive, and it means she won’t be travelling with him to Canada. Humiliated and upset, she has to stay in St Rule, and gets a job in a vaguely New Age coffee shop in the divinity faculty, thanks to the owner, part of a charming couple who helped her home in her distress.
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Ten years on and Cameron is back home for Christmas. He was a school friend of Joanie’s - indeed, he was filmed finding Joanie’s “corpse” in the video - but they haven’t really spoken since. He is now a schoolteacher, and his surprise visit to Mum and Dad is not everything it seems: he has split up from his fiancée and is spending the festive period working up the guts to tell them.
Meeting old friends, any enquiry about Joanie draws a blank, and then anonymous Christmas cards warning him to back off. As Joanie’s narrative unspools, we learn that the chap in the Good Samaritan couple is an academic, whose expertise in medieval history has led him to explore the use of natural hallucinogens in rituals, by those seeking the supernatural and even by Viking berserkers. There is an obligatory reference to “so-called ‘witches’ or wise women, from fifteenth-century Europe, who burn henbane seeds to send them into a trance”. And the interleaved excerpts reveal that Joanie had a house invasion prior to the end of school when she was alone at home.
The outline is actually almost enough to give you a fighting chance at guessing how the various plot elements are correlated. It is a very slick production, with clues placed exactly where you would expect them to be, certain descriptions mentioned almost with a Post-It note saying “remember this”. In a way it feels almost reverse engineered. The fact that the very last sentence ties in to the title of the essay shows the level of artifice. Some scenes feel like the author saying “In precisely three sentences I am going to surprise you”. Perec, a propos of novels, said that you had to put up scaffolding to build them. Even more important, he said, is to remember to take it down afterwards.
Bluff, by Francine Toon, Doubleday, £16.99
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