Remain Silent by Susie Steiner

published 2020

There are many people writing about the lives of women in their 40s and over: in newspaper columns and novels. These are the women juggling childcare and jobs, parents and children, marriages and old and new relationships, their appearance and clothes and fitness regimes, solidarity with their contemporaries with their own problems.

I recognize all this, and enjoy the teasing out of the issues, and particularly like it when writers are funny about these problems. I still wasn’t really expecting that the best description I’ve read of these times would come in a police procedural about a completely different subject…

This book is absolutely wonderful, but it is very strange: a book of two interleaved, and very different, halves.

The crime story it tells is horrendous: partly because it is not a crime novel staple – serial killers and revenge tragedies and killing sprees can be hard to read about, but they don’t happen very much in real life, you don't worry that they are happening outside your door. Susie Steiner’s subject is people-trafficking, and Eastern European immigrants brought into the UK (and of course elsewhere) and in effect working as slaves, doing dirty, unsafe jobs no-one else wants to do. They are entirely at the mercy of the gangmasters, living in squalid houses, their pitiful wages stolen from them. It is totally convincing, and absolutely horrible. I am often wary of real-life topics in novels: I spend my whole time saying ‘but is it true? Which bits are true? Is there novelistic licence, can I rely on the facts or are they exaggerated?’ But in Remain Silent I didn’t doubt for a second that Steiner had done her research and everything she wrote about these lives was true and authentic, and totally appalling. She also looks at the responses of some people who strongly object to immigration, and want to make their feelings known. The whole tricky question gets a good going over.

One of the immigrant workers has died, in strange circumstances, and DI Manon Bradshaw, our series heroine, comes to investigate. And this is where the other half kicks in: while conducting her engrossing careful investigation, we also follow her thoughts about her complicated life, her friends and children and relationships. And it is hilarious and absolutely spot on. One reviewer said there are ‘many underlying truths spoken lightly’, and that is exactly right.

There is a tour de force scene where Manon warns someone about what will happen if he breaks up his marriage: It’s not a major part of the plot, but her lecture is amazing – wince-making, totally ringing with truth, and laugh out loud funny. Similarly, she ponders elsewhere on  appearances, feminism, 
partnerships, with throwaway lines such as ‘the truth is, ill people are annoying. They don’t help much about the house.’

She is spit-out-your-coffee funny, like a superb standup, and all this is sewn into her very sad story. I could quote from her all day, but I wouldn't know where to stop.

I said this about a previous book, Persons Unknown

The book contains many features that sometimes concern me: multiple POVs, use of the present tense, and a lot of detail about personal lives and relationships of the series characters. But I loved the book, raced through it, enjoying every moment of the complex investigation, Manon’s sometimes foolish moves, and the fears and mysteries in her own home.

--you do have to keep an eye on the headings of the sections, to check which character we are following, and whether this is a flashback or not. But it was very much worth the effort.

I would have liked a little more detail about the ultimate fates of a couple of the characters, but what I really want is some hope for them...

Susie Steiner herself has been ill, and  we can only hope that the deservedly-rapturous reception for this book has been some consolation after the year she has had.

Pictures of the Port of Klaipeda, the Lithuanian city where several of the main characters have come from, and where the investigation takes the police. Steiner herself explains at the end how she visited there herself in pursuit of her story.