Louise Mumford – The Safe House (2022)

Preamble

As I read and write and think a lot about detective and crime fiction, I’ve a series of reviews on the theme. Sadly, capacity is too limited to cover detective films and TV series too! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.

Or you can take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: preorder now!

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See also

These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations.

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
• Room, Emma Donoghue

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Review (5 out of 5)

* 4.5 out of 5, rounding up!

I read this book while awaiting Louise Mumford’s most recent, which has a long waiting list on Libby. As a novel, it explores one of the most challenging questions about being a parent: what is reasonable to do to keep a child safe? In a Covidian world, this question is particular fraught when it comes to health issues.

So one feels real empathy for Hannah, the mother in The Safe House, trying to keep her daughter, Esther, safe from the dangerous of an apparently poisonous world. Esther and Hannah live alone in a bunker, The House, which “keeps them safe”. They grow food through hydroponics, have an extensive routine of house maintenance, and sleep with a shotgun by the door, just in case.

I did feel that this was something of a game of two halves. The first third or so of the novel has a mysterious quality where the genre of the book is nebulous. This could be a dystopian world after an environmental collapse. There is no reason to think otherwise, and that is how Esther presents it to us. But the arrival of first a seemingly strong bird, when Hannah has said that almost all birds are dead, and then a man who does not wear the protective gear that the two women usually don, begins to challenge Esther’s picture of the world. Here, the novel solidifies into a psychological thriller in the contemporary world (sans Covid). Tom, the man who arrives knowing Esther’s name and apparently lots more besides, separates mother and daughter surprisingly swiftly, and Esther follows him into the world.

A little niggle, and why this was a 4.5 out of 5, although I’ve rounded up, is that I found Esther’s happy and enthusiastic transition into the real world a little glib, particularly because of her nascent romance with Tom. This perhaps indicates her childlikeness, having not had a normal childhood socialisation, but it felt too straightforwardly positive. Hannah’s difficulties in re-entering the world to pursue Esther felt much more accurately drawn; ironically, although she has always known the world beyond the bunker’s walls and undertaken annual trips, her world has shrunk so that she can barely function to find her way away from the few locations she knows by heart.

There are some nice twists here, which I won’t spoil, as well as some really lovely writing. I’m looking forward to reading Mumford’s other books.

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Check out my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: preorder now!