Book Review - Gone Girl by GIllian Flynn

This week I thought I’d try my hand at a book review. Because, although this is a creative writing blog, one of the best ways a writer can improve their own writing is to read as much as they can.

I am going to review Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a crime thriller novel that, as I’m sure you know, has recently been made into a film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.

Nick Dunne arrives home to his American suburban house to find that his wife, Amy, is missing and his house is trashed. As the investigation progresses, the police start to realise that the evidence doesn’t match up and Nick starts to look more and more guilty.

Gone Girl fits perfectly into the crime thriller genre but it is so much more than that. It is different, unpredictable. The unreliable narration is very clever in leading the reader in one direction, fooling them into thinking they’re figuring out all the clues, and then revealing they were wrong from the start.

On top of that, the narration is so easy to read and beautifully written. With a lot of novels, I find I’m very conscious of the fact that I’m reading a constructed narrative, that the author probably spent hours poring over their metaphors and picking the perfect analogies. Gone Girl is completely different. The narration feels natural, it flows perfectly. It feels like you’re having a chat with the narrator.

Furthermore, Gone Girl opens your eyes to areas of social conduct that are taken for granted and shouldn’t be. Such as  the concept of the ‘cool girl’; the idea that every girl trying to find a boy pretends to be the girl who drinks beer, plays video games and doesn’t mind if her boyfriend cancels on her to play poker with his friends. Whereas no man ever pretends to watch gossip girl, drink wine and knit in order to attract a girlfriend. Gillian Flynn is very clever at creating stereotypical characters (without you realising it) only to subvert them in the second half of the novel in order to open your eyes to social issues such as these.

Gone Girl is an absolute page turner for 50% of the book. However, the book starts to disappoint in the second half. By this point in the novel, we have found out who’s behind Amy’s disappearance and all of the literary tension that kept us reading before this point leaks out. The characters become less realistic and relatable. And the most disappointing part of all is the ending. It falls flat of the fantastic thriller you’ve read up to this point and seems almost anticlimactic. When reading it, I felt fairly certain that Gillian Flynn was merely trying to find an ending that was ‘unpredictable’ rather than an ending that would satisfy her readers.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone. It is a quick, easy, fun read. However, I would warn them not to expect the second half to be as good as the first.