Fellside by M R Carey

Little Miss Suicide Saviour

Fellside by M R Carey  begins when Moulson awakes with amnesia, following a house fire and heroin withdrawal.  She is sent to Fellside, a maximum security prison where, on the brink of death due to a hunger strike, the ghost of a small boy gives her a reason to live.

Content Warning:  This book contains multiple suicide attempts, one via hunger strike.

Story  ☆☆☆★★

The blurb left me thinking that I knew how this book was going to go, and it absolutely did not.  Fellside's blurb casts the book as a spooky ghost story which, while there are ghosts, they are not in the least frightening -- nor are they meant to be.  This wrong footing was really enjoyable, and left me just jaunting along for the ride.

If, like me, you were a teenager in the UK in the nineties, I'm sure you will remember a prison drama called Bad Girls.  It appears Carey was watching, too.  For those not au fait with this particularly niche pop culture reference, Bad Girls was a soap drama about a women's prison, with a bent screw, lesbian relationships and gangster wives running the place.  This was all very cutting edge in the nineties.  Back in the good old days.  Sigh.

Fellside could have been using Bad Girls as a script book, right down to the totally over the top bent screw, Dennis "the Devil" Devlin.  Devlin has little personality beyond being evil and sleeping with Harriet Grace, the kingpin of G Block.  Moulson falls foul of this pair, and frequent beatings ensue.

All this is rather marvellously melodramatic and would make for a brainless but fun romp, if it weren't for the last quarter being so entirely predictable.  There are other overly convenient devices, such as characters who exist purely to deliver exposition before conveniently dying or disappearing, that add up to make this book somewhat frustrating.  There are signs here of the storytelling wonders Carey performed in The Girl with All the Gifts, but there's a lot less character driven story and a lot more slacking for convenience here.

Style  ☆★★★★

Carey's style is a joy to read.  It flows clearly and the story races by.  He's not doing anything particularly avante garde, experimental or wowing, but one should never under appreciate a good solid writer who makes the pages fly by.

Substance  ☆☆★★★

The most interesting thing, for me, about Fellside is its treatment of its ghost and ghost world.  What was frustrating in Jason Arnopp's The Last Days of Jack Sparks was the assumption that an afterlife and God went had in hand.  Here is the perfect example of the secular ghost.  Some clunky exposition is used to attempt to rationalise Fellside's afterlife, but the essence is a ghost world that can be entered during sleep.  It is non-denominational -- in fact, besides a pastor who disappears once her usefulness is ended, religion isn't mentioned in Fellside at all.  There are equally no moral judgements about who enters the ghost world, or how.  The mechanic is left wide open, in a way that might frustrate some readers.

Carey takes an interest in courtroom drama that it might be interesting to see him develop in future.  But like much of this somewhat piece-meal book, it's never entirely developed, nor used to the effect it might be with a bit of focus.

Verdict  ☆☆★★★

There are two views that can be taken about Fellside.  One is that it's a book that keeps the reader guessing, to a certain point, and even when things get predictable the writing is good enough to carry it.  However, it is also a very piece-meal book that tries to do a lot without really focusing and doing one thing well.  The overall effect is confusing, and a bit frustrating, but definitely worth a read.