The Long and Faraway Gone: A Novel

"This is my favourite crime novel of the last ten years. Maybe the last twenty years. It’s an extraordinary book. It has two parallel narratives. One starts with a gun massacre in a movie theatre, the other with a teenage girl going missing at the Oklahoma State Fair. Both of these events happen in the summer of 1986. Where the girl went, and who was responsible for the shooting, are both mysteries that have never been solved. Twenty years later, the sole survivor of the shooting and the sister of the missing girl are both obsessed with these two events from their past. The survivor of the shooting is now a private investigator. He’s trying to put it behind him, but it weighs very heavily on his subconscious. He finds himself back in Oklahoma while investigating another case, and is drawn back into trying to figure out what happened that night and who was responsible. At the same time, you have the story of this woman who’s been obsessed with finding out what happened to her older sister, and has spent those twenty years searching but has never got anywhere. She suddenly gets a small breakthrough in the case. “Mystery writing is a craft, like being a magician: you’ve got to be able to use red herrings, misdirect” The genius of this book—and this is a massive spoiler—is that these two parallel narratives run alongside each other without ever converging. The characters never meet each other, although they are both there in Oklahoma, happening at the same time. So they’ll go to the same place, they might bump into the same person, or make a similar observation about something in Oklahoma. But the stories interlock only thematically, rather than in terms of plot, which is so unexpected. All the way through you’re thinking, ‘This has got to intersect at some point. The answer to the crimes in one person’s story must be found in the other’s.’ I won’t give away the resolution. I will say that this book won loads of prizes in the US—all the big crime writing prizes—but I don’t think it sold particularly well, maybe because it’s too complex or difficult to explain. But it deserves a huge audience because it’s so well written, so absorbing, so accessible. His later book, November Road , was a bigger hit. That’s brilliant too, but I think this is his masterpiece. This is a very unusual book, and I would imagine that some people would find some elements of the book unsatisfying because things are not neatly tied up—some new mysteries spring out of what the main characters discover as they go along. Really the book is more about learning to lay to rest the ghosts of the past, to move on from terrible things that have happened to you, or the people you’ve lost. Rather than the typical crime novel resolution where the bad guy gets caught and either killed or put in prison and justice is done. The Long and Faraway Gone doesn’t have that kind of ending, and—as I said—I’m always looking for something different, so I think that’s one of the reasons why it really appealed to me. From an artistic point of view, I really like books with an open ending. I write books with open endings myself, because I like the reader to be able to imagine what’s going to happen next. I think that lingers longer in the mind."