Thin Air, the sixth in Ann Cleeves’ series about Jimmy Perez and his isles, takes us to Unst, Shetland’s most northerly island. I found this one, like its island, a bit of an outlier. A major plot point is the reported sighting of Peerie Lizzie, the ghost of a child who drowned several decades before. The result is a novel that leans at time into the supernatural and at times I can’t decide whether this is a misstep or a masterstroke. Either way I find myself less engaged than usual even though the whole thing makes perfect sense for this stage in the series.
Even if there were no sightings of Peerie Lizzie, Cleeves makes clear that the normal rules of reality don’t apply. Just as in White Nights, we’re close to the simmer dim, but a season of almost constant light is balanced by disconcerting and disorientating mist. The land is knowable to those who tend it, and the sense of community means that human contact is knowable too, but cold, hard facts jostle with superstitions that have yielded traditions, or perhaps it is the other way around.
Perez has healed, a little, since the murder of his beloved: he is understood not to be fully himself yet although at one point towards the end Willow, infuriated by yet another solo operation snaps to herself that he is trying to prove that he is ‘back at the top of his game’. In fact, he is muddling through but at a higher level than in Dead Water. There is still room for Sandy, who rekindles acquaintance with a former teenage romance, and whose ringtone is revealed as the theme tune to Captain Pugwash. We feel that Cleeves has both fondness and a mischievous policy towards Sandy’s professional development. Willow, the third (though most senior) main detective plays a relatively small role: enough to keep her on the pitch but on an opposite wing to Perez – for now.
We have, of course, covered the characters (including the island) before getting to the themes of the novel. Thin Air is really about belonging, and the opportunities for this afforded both by the islands and by environments more likely to be familiar to Cleeves’ readers. The islands have a clear call to outsiders, even if the more snobby of the visitors see not efficiency in a room used for multiple purposes but something that is a cause for embarrassment. The friends still forged by their common university experiences, the woman who came to Shetland on an oil work camp and who stayed, the men who came to the island to build a business: all these are trying to find a way to belong whether in their family, their friendship or professional group, or their community. But, even among the close-knitted Unst, we figure loneliness is highly possible.
Perez goes to London, and to the library that is the workplace for one of the friends/suspects. One of the workers there was ‘shrouded in so much fabric that there seemed to be no real substance to her’. Compared with Perez, grounded by his innate understanding of his home environment, it is the Londoner who is made of thin air.
Where this novel really works is when it makes you think about how the characters’ solidity, as it were. The island’s a backdrop but people react to it in different ways. London is a useful counterpart, but while countless authors have written about atomisation and loneliness in the big city, it’s only when you compare to this northern island with its mists and its ghosts that you get a real feel for it all.
Other Shetland coverage on Cafethinking:
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[…] White Nights is an oddity in the first series of Shetland books (Ann Cleeves wrote two sets of four novels): it is the only one of the four that did not receive a TV adaptation, and it describes the slow and gentle beginning of the relationship between Jimmy Perez and Fran Hunter: a relationship that defines the TV Perez even in the recently finished fifth series. Both are good reasons to give it a try. I think that it would be hard to have televised this novel. There is, once again, fine characterisation, but the overall sense is of the ‘simmer dim’, a time of year when you can read outside at midnight and a season that in the view of Jimmy Perez sends everyone ‘a bit crazy’. It’s a function of the Shetland calendar that is integral to the overall plot and to the mystery, and it ties perfectly to the themes of familiarity and otherness that are a hallmark of Cleeves’ creation. This community of Biddista is a place in which generations grow up together, pathing a way between curtain-twitching claustrophobia and the alienation of the city. Biddista has produced its share of artists and an internationally-known musician. It’s a place that thinks of England, rightly, as a foreign land, and where a resident can find that a year spent on Fair Isle can be incredibly unsettling. As is often the case in these novels, a contemporary death opens up a long-suppressed secret, involving lost loves, regrets and a disappearance. Cleeves continues to build the character of Perez, and of Fran, and gives us Kenny, a man largely comfortable with life in his own skin, and his great love Edith. Their relationship has grown stronger over the decades and is beautifully described. Cleeves has slightly less patience with Bella, an artist most comfortable in the limelight, and Peter Wilding, a creepy writer. It is Roy Taylor, Perez’s superior from Inverness, with whom you think Cleeves has had the most fun. Whereas Perez is rooted in his humanity and understanding of his community, Taylor is all about the action. He’s energetic but not necessarily in a good way. For Taylor, as Perez observes, it’s the ‘last-minute flights and hurried arrangements. The overnight drive. Gallons of coffee in empty service stations.’ This is not a man of Shetland. He is an unKenny creation. We raise our eyebrows at his tetchiness and pettiness. But Cleeves makes it clear that Taylor’s big problem is that he has never found a way to belong. And if the Shetland novels are about anything, they are about what it means to belong. (Perhaps the TV series takes a slightly different path.) That perhaps explains the Easter egg with the part of the novel set in the West Yorkshire town of Denby Dale. A little bit of time of the search engine reveals that Denby Dale is where Ann Cleeves’ husband Tim once worked, though the couple met on Fair Isle. But there is another meaning of ‘belonging’, referring to possession and ownership – both over property and over other people – that cuts to the heart of the plot. You won’t be surprised to know that it’s our Jimmy Perez who pwns his boss Taylor at getting to the bottom of it. As for me, I was nowhere near solving the mystery. But I was glad to have the chance to be an observer, and to share in the simmer dim. You can get White Nights here (affiliate link). Other Shetland coverage on Cafethinking: Raven Black White Nights Red Bones Blue Lightning Dead Water Thin Air […]