Literary Life | The Farm by Tom Rob Smith | Review

I read Child 44 a while ago, after picking it up from The Works on the off chance it would be a good read. Which it really was. But then I shelved it on my bookcase and thought little more of it, until this week just gone. I was browsing the shelves of my local library for something new to read on my commutes, after exhausting both Glamour Magazine and November's Vanity Fair (which was well worth a read and made me admire Jennifer Lawrence all the more.)

The Farm - a book by Tom Rob Smith who also penned Child 44 - promised thrilling drama and a whole host of crimes, all of which hinged around a family full of secrets. Set between London and Sweden, the book is enriching and very visually engaging thanks to Smith's use of language. There are of course, as is often expected with crime-inclusive narratives, some scenes which are hard to real. The troll motif that seems to underpin much of the story is certainly unsightly but the illusions to declining mental health and events of the summer of '63 which finally become uncovered, are the hardest to stomach.

I love stories that delve in the darkest parts of the human anatomy. The brain is such a fascinating organ to me; how it can be so powerful and yet so easily rendered into confusion. Smith tackles this well, never really letting on who we are supposed to believe and invest in. Stories sound true until proven otherwise and characters that appear one way are sometimes viewed so very differently through the eyes of another. Daniel, our driving point into the heart of the story, is moving through life shrouded in secrets. He is keeping one from his parents - the fact that he loves and lives with a man - but it never occurs to him that they could be keeping secrets from him too.The Farm is a book that travels forwards and backwards, in both time and place. Sweden and London are interchanged less than the past and the present but the novel seems to tirelessly promote a feeling of movement, of unease.

So much of the text correlates with other chapters that it became hard for me to separate a passage to add to my quote collection. In the end, I went for a small section early on in the book that would go on to have ramifications for the close of the novel, not that I knew it at the time of reading.

"There were glossier books about trolls, sanitised child-friendly stories, but this tatty old anthology, long out of print, found in a secondhand bookstore, was filled with gruesome stories. By far it was my mum's favourite book to read at bedtime, and I'd heard each of the stories many times."