Review of Mari Strachan's The Earth Hums in B Flat

I have read very few novels that successfully develop the unreliable narrative voice. For the most part this style of limited and sometimes actively misleading narration is relegated to short stories where it is easier for the author to keep everything moving fluidly and for the reader to really understand what is actually happening. Mari Strachan breaks that tradition with the young and naïve Gwenni Morgan in the novel, The Earth Hums in B Flat. With a Welsh background and a small town setting this novel involves a poor, but highly driven and close-knit village that is motivated equally by tradition as it is idle gossip. Seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Gwenni, who still clings to her childhood mentality of simplistic imagination and a dislike of boys, it quickly dawns on the reader that what she says can neither be called truth for a lack of rationality nor can it be called lies for its earnestness.

As rich as the setting and characters get, along with the (mostly) natural story progression, Ms. Strachan approaches an interesting and moving story. However, she falls into a few traps that prevented me from ever truly liking The Earth Hums. For one –and this is not entirely Ms. Strachan’s fault - the novel’s cover synopsis sets the stage for an investigative story with very perceptible and intense consequences for Gwenni’s town. While there are influences of this throughout the story it is neither as important, nor as direct a topic as the synopsis would have you believe. In this way I spent more than half of the story waiting for it to pick up, only to realize, within the last few pages, that it already had. That isn’t to say Ms. Strachan chose a poor pace for her novel, simply that the expectation introduced by the synopsis was a bit misleading.

The other major issue I had with The Earth Hums was that Ms. Strachan withheld a bit too much information from the reader. With a firm intent to keep gossip in the back of her mind so that actual revelations wouldn’t blindside her, Gwenni otherwise ignored the idle talk of her best friend and the rest of the town, and asking for answers could possibly cause more trouble than it might have solved. In this way no one spoke of the underlyng issues that ultimately drove the story until the very end, where answers were presented to the reader for questions that hadn’t yet been asked openly.

The Earth Hums in B Flat’s kind and sometimes sad look at Gwenni and her family initially charmed me with Gwenni’s unusual and simplistic view of life around her. However, once that initial charm passed, I found that there was very little to support the story’s momentum. It seemed as though Mari Strachan was unwilling to let her readers in on the little secrets, for whatever reason, and the story as a whole suffered for that with a slow moving plot and periods of distraction that didn’t support the story’s eventual climax. Even though it had the making of a great novel with well developed characters and setting I find that I cannot recommend this book.

Strachan, Mari. The Earth Hums in B Flat. Edinburgh, Scot.: Canongate, 2009.