A few weeks ago, Mr Litlove was under the weather and so he decided to distract himself with a book. He settled for The Farm, by Tom Rob Smith, a novel I’d given him for his birthday. He started it that morning, ‘this is very good,’ he said at lunchtime, and by the late afternoon he had finished it.
He’d found it both gripping and clever, and since he’s quite hard to please when it comes to fiction, I was very curious about it now. So a couple of days later, I picked it up too.
Daniel has thought that his parents are enjoying a quiet retirement in Sweden, his mother’s native land, where they are running a small, remote farm. Then one day, returning to his London apartment after a trip to the supermarket, his father calls him, clearly distressed. His mother is ill, disturbed; she’s been making wild accusations and suffering from paranoia, and has been taken to a mental hospital. Daniel hardly has time to digest this shocking information and buy a plane ticket to Sweden before he gets another call, this time from his mother. ‘Everything that man has told you is a lie,’ she insists to him. ‘I’m not mad. I don’t need a doctor. I need the police.’ She is on her way to Heathrow airport where she wants him to meet her and provide her with sanctuary.
Unsurprisingly, Daniel doesn’t know what to believe. He hasn’t seen his parents for a while, not because of any rift, but because he is keeping a secret of his own. He’s gay, and doesn’t know how to tell them. His mother, he knows, had a difficult childhood and has made every possible effort to keep his happy and free from care. To Daniel, it’s not the fact of his homosexuality that will bother them, but his own reluctance to confide in them. His mother’s determined creation of a perfect upbringing has in fact disabled him in two ways: the first is that he can’t tell them anything that may blemish the smooth surface of their past, the second that if that smooth surface breaks down, he fears that all sorts of terrible things may emerge. When his mother arrives, it’s the meeting with his partner, Mark, that he worries about. But she is so strung out, so bursting to tell him her strange tale, that she barely notices anything about her surroundings.
She has with her a satchel that she tells him is packed full of ‘evidence’, and she insists on taking him through it piece by piece, convinced that it has been the scattered, disjointed nature of her narrative that has left her open to the charge of insanity in Sweden. Even so, her story treads a fine line – is she overreacting to the things that have happened? Has her troubled past finally caught up with her? Or is there really something dark and disturbing going on that involves the corruption of a small town?
Funnily enough, I found myself distracted in the opening parts of the story by the conviction that it was autobiographical in nature. It was something about the way the narrator described not being able to tell his parents about his sexuality, the urgency of those opening scenes. In fact, a quick online search revealed that the whole premise of the novel actually happened. Tom Rob Smith’s Swedish mother did turn up at his flat to tell him and his brother that she was recently released from a psychiatric institution where she had been placed against her will, after uncovering wht she thought was a conspiracy involving their father. Woah – after that sort of family drama, you probably would have to write about it. In an article in The Telegraph, he says: “with writing it’s like you can retreat from the muddle that is everything else.” Perhaps that’s one reason why the novel is brilliantly plotted.
In The Farm, the narrator, Daniel, eventually takes a trip to Sweden to find out the truth about his mother’s wild accusations, and the truth turns out to be something intriguingly twisted and different. Viewed overall, from a bit of a distance, this really is a clever novel that takes the tropes of Scandi noir thriller and makes something quite unusual out of them. It is very gripping and the mother’s tale is spookily unnerving, her recounting an uneasy mix of insight and extraordinary leaps of assumption. The way that stories generate their truths via the alliance of events and emotions, and the way coherence can be utterly misleading, is beautifully explored. But this isn’t a perfect novel. The first part, the mother’s story, takes 286 pages to tell, the resolution in Sweden a mere 80, and this imbalance has a cost, I think. The thriller element is lost along the way, Daniel’s initial sense of being torn between his parents simply fades. You still end up with a good story; but it isn’t quite the story you thought you had at the beginning.
I felt a bit mean telling Mr Litlove that I’d thought it a tad flawed here and there, after his wholehearted enthusiasm for the novel. But it may well be that this is a book best consumed in a single sitting. It’s very smooth and easy to read, so the prospect is quite do-able. And it is really clever and well written. It’s certainly left me with a strong desire to read his Moscow trilogy that began with Child 44.
