Cafethinking

None of this is true, by Lisa Jewell – book review

On the simplest level, the new Lisa Jewell thriller None of this is true invites us to cover much well-trodden ground. Creepy Person invades the life of Someone Nice who almost has it all. No one is a reliable narrator. And we’re made complicit because it’s our voracious appetite for looking through strangers’ windows that drives Someone Nice to go along with Creepy Person even when all her instincts are telling her to run for her and others’ lives. Yes, we do get all that. But None of this is true works so well as a thriller because the ending is only the beginning. We’re fascinated with what has brought everyone to this point. 

Front cover of None of this is true by Lisa Jewell
None of this is true by Lisa Jewell, published in the UK by Cornerstone on 20 July 2023. Source: review copy

The thing with Jewell’s writing is this. She reveals quite a lot of the what early on. She keeps enough for a big twist, but we know early who the bad person is and who’s going to get it. (The prose-podcast transcript mix really helps with this.) We stay, mainly because the story-telling is so good – fresh, pacy, compelling even when the characters are deliberately none of those things, but also because we want to know how. But it’s the why that has us pausing once we’ve got to the end. What do we learn about ourselves and our society and our humanity?

That may sound a little over the top. Not for Jewell the big set piece political number, in which conspiracies are uncovered and power structures dismantled. But there’s plenty on trust, and how we open ourselves up to people in ‘authority’, to victims (nuance isn’t a reason to close ourselves off), to our own instincts, to people who say they are our birthday twin. As ever, Jewell examines relationships that are superficially healthy and questions whether they are quite as healthy as they seem, or as unhealthy as we suddenly assume. But she also examines our relationships with the past and the future and how they affect the present. There’s a smidgeon of mid-life crisis here too, with Josie in particular wanting to reinvent, and Alix noticing that foibles she’d have laughed off in the past are becoming unacceptable. 

All of the main adult characters have gone to find answers in their lives. Pat abandoned motherhood but became indispensable elsewhere. Walter’s relationship with his daughter is observed by hundreds of thousands of gamers – but it’s hidden from his wife. Nathan keeps his downs away from Alix. Alix has ridden the success of snap decisions, but her place of escape – her recording studio – wasn’t built by her and perhaps that prevents her from discussing her strategy with Nathan. What is it about Alix that makes Josie think that she holds the answer that will set Josie free? The answer comes, of course, from what Josie thinks is Alix’s weightless, Instagrammable lifestyle, even though it is the untidiness of Alix’s kitchen that makes Josie relate to her more. But when Alix beats herself up for being a ‘flibbertigibbet’ we know the punishment was disproportionate.

Jewell’s books quite often encourage the reader to hold a mirror up to themselves, but with None of this is true she takes it to the max. We’re not just readers this time, we’re not just peering through Walter Fair’s window: we’re listening in via the podcast, and we’re watching on Netflix. Jewell has something to say about that in the fictional marketing blurb: ‘Absolutely spine-chilling stuff, with some shocking glimpses into the darkest corners of humanity: we guarantee you’ll be bingeing the whole thing in a day.’ We’re bad people and just like Alix and Josie we hide the truth from ourselves. Some of this is true.

Thanks to Cornerstone for the review copy.

Other Lisa Jewell novels reviewed on Cafethinking:

Don’t Let Him In

The Family Remains

The Night She Disappeared

Invisible Girl

The Family Upstairs

Bonus post on the ending of Watching You

Watching You

Then She Was Gone

8 comments

  4. […] Lisa Jewell knows people. She knows her characters, and she knows her readers. That almost sounds insulting, if read in a sarcastic voice, so let me explain. Towards the end of her latest novel, Jewell has Tom tell his son Freddie, ‘I’ve been watching you. All along. Watching everything you do.’ Tom has been watching Freddie. Freddie has been watching – and taking photos of – Jenna, and Bess, and Romola, and a bunch of other schoolgirls, plus Joey Mullen and Frances Tripp. Frances Tripp has been watching Tom and a whole bunch of other people. Jenna uses social media to track Bess when she thinks her best friend is in trouble. All that watching going on. Everyone is watching everyone else. But no one is seeing anything, because although all the information they need is buried in plain sight, their personal filters make them ignore it. All of the watching. None of the thinking. That might be slightly unfair. Jewell creates three main characters who provide us with the main points of view (POV) as the story unfolds. We pretty much know that they didn’t do it (we don’t know for sure what ‘it’ is but we know there is an ‘it’), and Jewell is careful to present them as three-dimensional creations; they are not just there to move the plot along. Freddie wants to be a spy, Jenna wants to be carefree and Joey who is approaching her thirties wants to be an adult. Their worlds come together (of course, it’s a story) but at the beginning they are just doing what they are doing. In their observations, we enjoy the playful but incisive descriptions we’ve come to associate with Lisa Jewell: the sodium gloom of a January afternoon, a rather kind homage to the dad bod, the unsentimental but yet sympathetic description of teenagers: Girls oozing through the gates, a river of royal blue and grey, idly tossed hair and Fjällräven rucksacks, laddered tights, Skinnydip phone cases and loud, loud voices. This approach is of course essential for a successful psychological thriller. We don’t just need to know who, we need to know why. So we have to care about the characters more than we care about the mystery. On the whodunit, Jewell dangles clues that her more perceptive readers (ie. not this reader) will work out in good time: this is all in plain sight, remember; but as she does so she lets the three main POV characters develop and think and grow and perform small acts of kindness or self-discovery that help you begin to root for them. Other characters aren’t fleshed out in nearly the same way: Tom, the head teacher, is a far more ambiguous creation (and probably the better for it), and I feel sorry for Alfie, until I don’t. This helps Jewell play with our emotions and our assumptions – about the relationship between Tom and Nicola, for example. I don’t know enough about mental health to say whether Frances’ condition is well portrayed, but the exploration of Asperger’s is I think carefully done. I am slightly intrigued to know whether Lisa Jewell has fallen out with Martin Amis. Freddie is compiling a dossier, called The Melville Papers which seems to me to be a shout out to The Rachel Papers – but, towards the end, Amis’s first novel is mentioned for real. And Freddie’s later dossier is called The Information, a reference to Amis’s novel about two novelists enjoying different levels of success. I don’t think Jewell makes these references without due thought. She is certainly aware of how to play with the emotions of her readers. In the epilogue, she sets up a nice, quite-romantic coda to bring us down after the truth-spilling of the preceding pages before punching us with a new revelation that is as shocking as Rose’s gramophone adventures at the end of Brighton Rock. Watching You is a story that will take you back to your teens. Told with style and with an all-too-human cast of characters, it’s a taut, psychological thriller which brings the reader in and gets them really involved. UPDATE 1: Lisa has responded to what we might call the Martin Amis Question: You can order Watching You here (affiliate link).  Here’s my review of Jewell’s previous novel, Then She Was Gone. Thanks to Century for the review copy. UPDATE 2: Following a few requests I’ve posted my theory about the ending. Obviously there are all the spoilers. Click here to read it. Other Lisa Jewell novels reviewed on Cafethinking: Then She Was Gone The Family Upstairs Invisible Girl The Night She Disappeared The Family Remains None of this is true […]

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