Penance by Eliza Clark

Penance
by Eliza Clark
Harper Collins 2023

The mewling youth on proud display in Eliza Clark's debut novel Boy Parts took many forms, from stilted prose to brainless social satire to flat self-referential characters. A handful of prepubescent readers called it “promising,” but even that might have been a warning rather than a compliment: maybe it was “promising” an entire career of unearned attention and gawd-awful work?

Worried readers (weary book reviewers foremost among them?) will find some cause for hope in Clark's new novel Penance, which tells the stories revolving around the decade-old murder of a teenage girl named Joan Wilson in the Yorkshire town of Crow-on-Sea. Joan was captured, tortured, and set on fire by three of her classmates and died an agonizing three days later, having named her attackers to paramedics.

Clark folds this story into another story, which is lodged inside a third. Her novel is the blistering exposé of the 2016 Crow incident written by disgraced journalist Alex Carelli, who identifies the murderers as Girl A, B, and C but who, we're told, is hardly a reliable narrator – a note on the text warns readers, “Shortly after publications, several of Carelli's interviewees publicly accused Carelli of misrepresenting or even fabricating some of the content of their interviews.” Readers get Carelli's version, ostensibly cleaned up and vetted, and within that story unfolds what amounts to a clever whodunit about the identities and motives of Girls A, B, and C and what actually happened to Joan Wilson.

As the novels progresses, innocence thins like morning fog. Crow-on-Sea, connected by rail to Scarborough and “a fully-fledged resort town by the early 1900s,” becomes darker and darker as the pages turn. The whole place was founded by a bloodthirsty Norseman named Hrókr the Crow, and the town's most famous export was a Jimmy Saville-like radio and television presenter named Vance Diamond. “In the seventies and eighties, he was inescapable – he had been Crow-on-Sea's most famous son,” readers are told, and he was only later revealed to be a serial sex offender (“possibly one of the worst in British history,” goes the narrative in one of its many unattributed bits of opinion, “if one could quantify sex offences on a scorecard the way we might 'score' a serial killer.” When Simon Stirling-Stewart, the father of one of Joan's classmates, becomes inexplicably vocal in defense of Diamond, his daughter's personality darkens (She seemed more detached from reality,” another classmate tells Carelli, “more into her TV high school mean-girl character”). Similar darkenings increasingly fill the book as more of Crow's wretched history comes to light.

Thus, Clark's book features not just an unreliable narrator but an entire chorus of them, each contradicting the other, each looking to curry a different kind of favor with the popular opinion and the reader. This is promising grist for a novel to satirize precisely the “mean-girl character” of our modern social-media moment. Clark is perfectly positioned to turn the self-serving cacophony of teen-girl backbiting into a novel about truth and responsibility. The main problem? Great stretches of the novel skip the insight and just provide the backbiting in endless passages:

Angelica and Violet both talked to her, but not to each other. They chattered. Angelica was complaining about Joni, and Violet was muttering about the extent to which a Leave or Remain Brexit result could contribute to a Crow-centric pocket hell dimension. Dolly sipped her alcopop and scanned the crowd for Joni. She was supposed to be here tonight. One of Jamie's friends was going out with that stuck-up Annabelle girl, and she'd invited all their little friends. She was supposed to be here.

Clark maintains much, much more control over her narrative than she did in her debut; Penance is very often gripping reading, in a chatty, gossipy way, a little seaside world in which nothing and no one can be trusted and even the dead girl's hands aren't clean. In a closing expository section, readers learn that Carelli became a fixture on the true crime convention scene but was likewise forever darkened by Crow-on-Sea: “He seemed to develop an antipathy toward the scene, however, periodically invoking the wrath of the community many pointed out was 'paying his bills' by firing off critical (and often insulting) tweets aimed at other writers and podcasters.”

As for the story that brought him his fame and infamy, Penance, like history, offers no comfortingly definitive answers.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.