There Will Be Lies by Nick Lake

“There will be two lies,” the coyote tells Shelby. “Then there will be the truth. And that will be hardest of all.”

Shelby lives a very sheltered life. Home schooled, the only friends she has are on the internet, and the only place her mother ever allows her to go alone is the library. She lives too much in her own world for her to be safe in the outside one, she is told, and pretty much everything she know about the world, she knows from books and her mom.

The coyote comes to her just after the accident. She is waiting on the curb outside the library for her mom to pick her up when the car hits her, and now everything is different. Now they are on the run – her dad is alive after all, her mom tells her; they’ve been hiding from him all these years and now she’s afraid that he’ll find them from the hospital records after Shelby’s accident.

But the coyote said there would be two lies, so what if this is one of them? And if this is a lie, then what is the truth?

They are running, and her mom is contradicting herself left, right and centre, and Shelby doesn’t know who her mom is anymore, or who she is, either. And when she sleeps, she slips into the Dreaming. But is this real too? The coyote is there in the Dreaming, a shape-shifter who tells her the world is going to end in eight days and the only way to stop it is if she can rescue the child who has been kidnapped by the crone. And so Shelby must navigate these two parallel worlds, figure out how she fits in to both of them and deal with the loss of both everything she knew before and the things she knows now.

There Will Be Lies is a very powerful and intriguing story. I figured out the truth pretty early on, though Nick Lake’s storytelling did make me question my theory through the twists and turns and lies that he threw out. The two worlds is an unusual – though far from unheard of – construct which brought an extra level of surreality and questioning to the book – is it called the Dreaming for a reason, or is it as real as the world we know? Or – what defines whether something is real? Because if something is happening in our heads, surely that still makes it a real experience for us, even if others don’t perceive it to be so?

It also makes me think about the nature of lies – how do we know our own truths? Those things that may take place in our heads may be considered to be real, but by that extension, can they also be considered to be true? We are all capable of lying to ourselves as well – I recently read Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer, which plays on this very same idea; the character in Belzhar has told herself something which feels true and real to her but which turns out to not be true and real in the context of the wider world.

So is the Dreaming real, or is it a metaphor for what’s happening to Shelby in the real world? Perhaps it can be both. Will the world really end if Shelby can’t rescue the child in time? How do we define ‘end’? The Dreaming also pulls on the mythology of the Child, the Maiden and the Crone: the triple goddess of wiccan and pagan beliefs, though I suspect from Lake’s story – with the inclusion of the coyote – that perhaps there is similar mythology in the Native American belief system as well. In There Will Be Lies, Shelby takes on the role of the Maiden in this myth, though my understanding of the original is that the three roles are interlinked and are, essentially one and the same simply at different stages. This makes Shelby as much the Child as the Maiden which, when you read the book, gives away a pretty big clue as to the truth Shelby is searching for. Though the coyote tells her she must kill the crone to rescue the child, here the crone is a metaphor for her mother, I think, rather than the third aspect of herself.

To save herself, Shelby needs to extinguish what she thinks she understands about her mother – or come to terms with the part of her mother that resides in her. If she doesn’t save the child, then she will not be able to accept the new terms of her life – and by accepting the new terms of her life, she is able to save the child. Sometimes, in order to make something new, you have to break apart what came before. So what goes around, comes around, and everything is interlinked.

But, though the metaphor and mythology of the story comes predominantly from the parallel world of the Dreaming, I did find that the compulsion to keep reading was generated by what is taking place in the solid world. There are obstacles and adrenaline and danger in the Dreaming, but all the metaphor weighs quite heavily and reading those parts of the story was more like walking through sand while the ‘solid world’ happenings were easier to engage with, like rushing down a fast river. Nevertheless, they all come together to form an intense, thoughtful and excellently written and excellently constructed book that certainly stands out from the crowd. Nick Lake’s writing swells with intelligence and diversity of characters.

Belzhar, by Meg Wolitzer

Nobody knows what to do with Jam, and she doesn’t really know what to do with herself, either, except to live in the little world of memories of her and her time with Reeve. Reeve: this beautiful boy who lived and loved and died and left Jam alone. But now her parents have decided to send her to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school for “emotionally fragile, highly intelligent” teenagers, and she’s got to get up and go to her first class, “Special Topics in English”.

It’s a legendary class, apparently, “Special Topics in English”. Jam’s roommate, DJ, is desperate know what goes on in the class, and desperately disappointed not to have been selected for it. Jam couldn’t really care less, though; she just wants to get through the day and go back to her own, private world. And at first at least, it seems like a pretty regular class to her, except there’re only four other students and the homework includes writing in a stupid diary.

Gradually Jam begins to assimilate to her new surroundings, though the grief of Reeve’s loss follows her everywhere just the same. But then, when she finally opens the journal and begins to write, suddenly she can feel Reeve’s arms around her again, she can smell him and touch him and talk to him. It’s like she’s being given another chance to be with him. Is she the only one this happens to? As the experiences of the diaries begin to create a bond between the Special Topics students, they each tell their stories and form a tight-knit group that no-one else can penetrate. But what will happen when the diaries run out of pages? Can they find a way to hold onto the places the diaries take them to? To the people and things they’ve lost? And should they?

Belzhar is a book that is very hard to put down – first you have to keep reading to find out about Reeve and who he was and what happened, and then you have to keep reading to find out what the other Special Topics students are going to reveal. And then you have to keep reading – because, well, you have to keep reading. And then you begin to wonder: is everything really quite how it appears to be? Because when one person is telling the story, when it’s first person perspective, you only have what that person is telling you to go on. And what if what they’ve told themselves happened isn’t the whole truth?

Meg Wolitzer has created a really interesting ‘unreliable narrator’ in Jam, and an emotionally heart-pounding story – not just Jam’s story, but the other kids too. Can they each find a way to do the right thing in the end? And what if they don’t? Make sure you’ve run all your errands and done all your homework before you pick this book up – because once you do, that’ll be it for the day.

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer

I read a really excellent review for The Interestings which was instrumental in my picking it up to read, predominantly because of the reviewer’s gently scathing view of how books about families were looked down upon until men started writing books about families. Meg Wolitzer, obviously, is a woman and has, according to the reviewer, been writing excellent books about families for several years and because it is now – thanks to those male writers out there – ‘cool’ to be writing about families, her newest offering is set to make her name more solidly recognized within the public and literary domain.

As for 'The Interestings', they are a group of teenaged New Yorkers who attend a yearly arts camp and strike up a set of friendships and intimacies that will follow most of them far into their adult lives. From innocent beginnings, however, a dramatic act a couple of years into their group life sets waves rolling through their future  that, while they may get smaller as time passes, never fully disappear. Chopping and changing between past and present, young and middle-aged Interestings, we see the changing of their lives, the ebb and flow of their friendships, the good and the bad within each of them.

We have Cathy, a talented dancer, but cursed by her body shape to never be more in that arena beyond her teenage years, and after ‘the event’ she drops out of their group physically, though perhaps not emotionally. Secondly, Goodman, Cathy’s occasional paramour, and the cause of all the trouble. Ash, Goodman’s sister, a fey hypocrite who lies to her husband about Goodman’s disappearance and refuses (despite the pursuit throughout her life for women’s equality) to even consider the possibility of Goodman’s guilt – a man who never grows up, relying instead on his family to provide for him and never taking responsibility for a single action he makes. Or perhaps Ash is simply unable to consider Goodman’s guilt because of what it would mean?

Fourth, we have Ethan. Ethan is Ethan, and that’s about all there is to it. He gets caught up in the opportunities afforded him, and if he lies to his wife on occasion or struggles to connect with his son, hiding behind his work, is it any worse than Ash’s lies and denials? Jonah, meanwhile, spends his entire life overshadowed by the events of his tweens. Would it have been any different for him if he had told somebody what happened? Or would he still feel the same about it all anyway?

And, lastly, Jules. She is so determined and desperate to be away from what she feels is her small family and small life, she abandons it at the drop of a hat to infuse herself in the busy and glamorous city life of her 'Interestings' friends. Ironic that she winds ups spending so much of her life struggling to make ends meet and envying Ash, even after she grows up.

Each member of The Interestings is likeable and unlikeable, each one of them trying to escape something or find something. Is Jules cruel in the abandonment of her childhood? It’s ironic that she’s so desperate to grow up when she is young, only to spend much of her adult life desperate recapture those feelings she had when The Interestings first came together, trampling everyone in her way to get what she thinks she wants only to find it’s not what she thought it would be once she gets there. Is this what we are all really like? I guess so: the good bits and the bad bits; perhaps it’s only that by reading five, six lives condensed into 500 pages makes everything so much more apparent, human behaviors more alarming somehow than how we see each day as we take on our own lives.

The passing of time and the changing of the New York streets was perhaps most interesting to me, along with the subtle feminism that Wolitzer works into the book: just because you’ve slept with a person before doesn’t mean it’s not rape if a girl says no this time, or asks you to stop; and the fact that any media attention Ash receives for her theatre work always comes with the addendum of who her husband is, her work never held up purely for it’s own merit, as if she is worth that bit more merely by being married to who she is married to.

The Interestings, thus, is an intriguing and thoughtfully interwoven story of life, love and friendship, the twists and turns we cannot predict, the choices we do or don’t take. Life is an odd thing and Wolitzer shows this without reservation.