Half Broken Things (Hardcover)

This was the surprise winner of last year’s CWA Silver Dagger award. A surprise, that is, only to those who haven’t read it, as it is in truth a very deserving winner indeed; a subtly and knowingly written psychological thriller which has very distinct hints of Ruth Rendell about it. Certainly, Joss displays a Rendellesque ability at dissection of character and life, and anyone who admires the books of RR is guaranteed to like this perfectly tuned little piece.

As one of the cover blurbs says, Half Broken Things “sets its author on a path to greatness”. It is dark, compelling and clever. The characters are fascinating and excellently drawn, and Joss’ descriptions of the changes in light and of the base emotions associated with being human and simply belonging are particularly inspiring. It is an excellent novel, and I recommend it to all. I am now eagerly awaiting the next novel (“Puccini’s Ghosts”) from a clearly very talented writer.

Jean, writing a first person narrative at the end of her stay, instantly creates suspense when she reveals that there are "only eleven more days," and that she "does not plan to offer excuses for what we have done." Through flashbacks, we come to know her family background, learning of her childhood, her psychological and emotional abuse, her dysfunctional relationship with her demanding Mother, and her need for closeness. Michael, her "son," now "working" as a thief, is similarly needy, having survived a similarly horrific childhood. Steph, the third lost soul, is an abused teenager--pregnant, rejected, and homeless.

The characters, though off-beat when taken separately, become absurd when they start acting as a family. Living apart from society's rules, they begin acting to protect themselves and their lifestyle at Walden Manor. Jean speaks for all when she says, "I would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep us all together," and the reader has reason to believe her.

As the characters' self-protective actions become more extreme, the novel changes from suspenseful Gothic horror to the blackest of black-humored farce--some of the darkest humor I've read since Molly Keane's Time After Time. Joss has filled the novel with minute descriptions of her odd characters in the novel's early pages, creating chilling suspense while creating reader empathy with the characters. In the second half of the novel, however, the reader realizes that these characters are more than just "odd," as they engage in increasingly outrageous scenes. The pace accelerates, and the author's mordant humor is fully unleashed.

Coincidences, ironies, understatements, and absurdity combine as Joss guides the novel into that twilight zone between genuine suspense and genuine humor, keeping the reader smiling from the tenterhooks. The novel's themes of time, family, home, and the need for love are fully developed--in unique, unexpected, and darkly humorous ways. Mary Whipple

Jean seems to live in a perpetual dreamlike state, hovering somewhere between a vague though sapping sense of regret and a sort of grudging acceptance of her lot. She enjoys her job as a house sitter, reveling in the quietness and solitude; she even expects to go on to mind other houses. But when she gets a call from the house-sitting agency coldly informing her that this job managing the grand Walden Manor with be her last, she's absolutely devastated.

The agency thinks it's about time that Jean retired, she's getting just to old to do the job, they're even more anxious to get rid of her when they discover that she has accidentally broken an antique teapot. The news causes Jean to gradually withdraw from the outside world, and she suddenly starts imagining the house as hers, eating all the stored food, wearing the owners' clothes, and enjoying full use of the rooms and contents, even though this has been strictly forbidden by the agency.

Aching for love, Jean invents a son and places an adding the local paper in the hope that he will contact her. When Michael, a petty thief, and small time swindler, who also comes from a damaged childhood, answers it, Jean is overwhelmed with happiness and she chooses to smudge the facts that Michael is probably not really her son. Michael also arrives with the heavily pregnant Steph, dumped by her abusive boyfriend; Steph is an uneducated drifter whom Michael has picked up at a petrol station.

Jean, Michael and Steph are all damaged goods: Michael with the exposure of his squalid life, the absence of friends and prospects, Steph, who has found herself inhabiting places whose surfaces she could not soften and whose depths would not admit her, and Jean, who felt that the house from the very first made her feel things which perhaps she should find strange, but together secluded in this house they find a kind of peace, forming a type of family.

Author Morag Joss, writes a provocative and dark tale of love and deceit. Unfortunately, this trio is living on borrowed time, the owners eventually intending to return. Jean, Michael, and Steph are not only deceiving those around them, but are also intent on self-deception. The fact that Michael and Steph have no right to be at the manor because Jean herself is only temporary, and transient belongs in the end nowhere. But as long as everything remains unsaid it could be deemed not to be happening, "It could remain untrue for as long as they did not draw attention to it."

Joss writes delicately of time and place, using the city of Bath and its surrounds to her sinister advantage, her protagonists caught up in an emotional dilemma, from which they cannot control. Walden manor is indeed awash in silvery light and secrecy, "where time itself has stopped passing." Jean, Michael, and Steph caught up in a familiaral intensity; and the sense of danger and the discovery, once it strikes, is pervasive and ultimately catastrophic.

These are characters living on the edge, their days numbered, with this house weaving itself in and among them "gathering them all in towards itself and to one another." Half Broken Things is a psychologically complex and menacing tale of descent into unfamiliar territory, a kind of quasi sanity; the trio find themselves blindsided by events, violence rushing in, forever altering their perceptions of the world.