may-coffin-road‘Coffin Road’ is Peter May’s fifth novel set in and around the ruggedly beautiful Isle of Lewis and Harris, part of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, the British Isles’ first outpost against the might of the Atlantic Ocean. May takes on a double authorial risk in ‘Coffin Road’ and to his credit he comes up trumps, not surprising really since he has proven time and again he can produce outstanding, unconventional crime novels.

There’s a strong whiff of Robert Ludlum’s ‘The Bourne Identity’ (published in 1980) in the novel’s dramatic opening, featuring a man washed ashore after a storm on Lewis’ western coast: the man, the novel’s first-person narrator, has totally lost his memory. He has no clue who he is and where he is, or why. The similarity with Ludlum’s classic thriller ends here, but the other half of May’s authorial gamble remains: how to build a captivating plot starting from an amnesiac narrator, without giving the game away too early but at the same time sustaining the interest of readers needing some kind of foothold on the story.

May succeeds handsomely in doing both. It takes just over a third of the novel to put the initial events in enough of a context to start realising what the story is all about, and by then I was irretrievably hooked into the novel, tension sustained by a series of twists which take the reader by surprise almost as much as they do the memory-less protagonist. All the more credit to May for achieving this since he worked with only a handful of characters, as one would expect in such a remote location as the Isle of Lewis.

I usually shy away from giving plot details in my reviews, but in this case I find it impossible to give even the barest bite. The beauty of more than half of the novel is how virtually everything comes as a surprise to the protagonist as much as to the reader, so even a hint of what is going on would be enough to spoil the fun. I’ll try to work my way around this, as chefs sometimes do, by listing some of the characters/ingredients, without mentioning how they interact with each other: the protagonist has four mysterious (to him) neighbours, two of them a couple, his first anchors with reality after he wakes up half-drowned on the beach. There is a dead man  on one of the Flannan  Isles, about 20 mi west of Lewis and Harris, not much more than a rock with a lighthouse. And soon it is evident that the protagonist’s life is in danger, as an attempt is made to kill him on the same day he found himself ashore.

Above all, there is nature. A constant in May’s Lewis novels, the unforgiving but breathless beauty of the Hebrides and of the ocean that seems bent on sinking them are a character in their own right, a presence that is much more than a backdrop to the story. The sea and the tides and the weather are forces so powerful they dictate the rhythm of life on the islands, and May weaves this primal power, and man’s puny but unceasing attempts to survive it, very skilfully into the narrative, giving it a depth that is unique in contemporary British crime fiction.

For all his ability in portraying, besides nature, the novel’s leading adult characters, May lets the reader down slightly in his treatment of the one teenager in the story, Karen, a very young woman with a crucial part to play. Karen’s background and daily life feel a wee bit clichéd, their rendering somewhat perfunctory at the outset. The reason I was struck by this is perhaps in the contrast with May’s brilliant portrayal of teenage life in the first of his Lewis Trilogy novels, ‘The Blackhouse’: in turn funny, heart-rending, emotional, always intriguing and above all spot-on in its psychological insights.

However, the scope of the narrative in ‘Coffin Road’ is ample enough, and May’s plotting so intriguing, that in time Karen does come into her own and becomes a key presence in the story. I grew to like her as much as the other main characters, including George Gunn, one of the detectives introduced in May’s ‘Lewis Trilogy’, whose part in this stand-alone novel is less crucial than in the other Lewis novels, but no less entertaining. But above all it is the ideas that underpin the novel, the reason why the protagonist is amnesiac, and what it is that he was actually working on, that confirm May’s standing as a major contemporary British crime fiction author.