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A review by jbistheinitial
The Comforts of Home by Susan Hill
2.0
The Comforts Of Home opens almost exactly where the last Serrailler novel ended, with Simon grievously injured in the course of duty, and the core of the book concerns his recovery from those injuries, first on the Scottish Island of Taransay( where he inevitably becomes involved in a murder investigation), and then back home in the fictional cathedral town of Lafferton, where the cold case of a missing girl has been reopened at the insistence of her mother while an arsonist carries out a series of attacks in the area.
The strength of Hill's Simon Serrailler serieshas always been a strong focus on character, with Simon's GP sister Cat (and her family) playing as important a part as does the titular police detective Simon. The dramas of family life for Cat, Simon and their father are often as central to the books as the crimes themselves. However, in The Comforts Of Home this strength becomes the book's greatest weakness. The first 40% of the book deals with Simon's rehabilitation on on Taransay, while back in Lafferton, Cat's career crisis and difficulties with her teenage children are the focus. In a third concurrent narrative, their increasingly sinister father’s time in France is described in detail. However, where previous books have worked the family dramas into the investigation from the start, here the detection doesn't really takes off until the second half of the novel, which makes it feel like slow going.
While Hill's characters have always existed in an upper middle class milieu this hasn't usually affected my enjoyment of the books because they have also have tended to have a healthy dollop of self-awareness. However, in The Comforts Of Home their privilege sat increasingly uneasily with me; in a country where it's estimated that 14 million people live in poverty, including 1 in 3 children, I found it especially difficult to swallow Cat's justification to work in private medicine, when her reasoning was that £100 a month isn't much to most families, just the equivalent of "a supper out or half a dozen bottles of average wine". Cat, who has previously been the moral centre of the novels, as set against Simon's emotional coldness and Richard's violence, was the greatest disappointment here. Not just leaving the NHS but her continued support for her proven domestic abuser and accused rapist father, she comes across as an almost entirely different person from previous novels.
These elements could be almost forgiven, though, if the writing was strong and the crime element as intriguing as previous books, but sadly neither is true. The murder on Taransay in which Simon becomes embroiled comes with a side of unpleasant transphobia while both the cold case and the arsons in Lafferton lack any sense of urgency or narrative coherence. Overall - and surprisingly, given the long wait for The Comforts Of Home - it reads like a series of short story ideas stitched into a novel at the last minute. I would still wholeheartedly recommend Hill's previous Serrailler books, and hope this is a blip in an otherwise excellent series.
The strength of Hill's Simon Serrailler serieshas always been a strong focus on character, with Simon's GP sister Cat (and her family) playing as important a part as does the titular police detective Simon. The dramas of family life for Cat, Simon and their father are often as central to the books as the crimes themselves. However, in The Comforts Of Home this strength becomes the book's greatest weakness. The first 40% of the book deals with Simon's rehabilitation on on Taransay, while back in Lafferton, Cat's career crisis and difficulties with her teenage children are the focus. In a third concurrent narrative, their increasingly sinister father’s time in France is described in detail. However, where previous books have worked the family dramas into the investigation from the start, here the detection doesn't really takes off until the second half of the novel, which makes it feel like slow going.
While Hill's characters have always existed in an upper middle class milieu this hasn't usually affected my enjoyment of the books because they have also have tended to have a healthy dollop of self-awareness. However, in The Comforts Of Home their privilege sat increasingly uneasily with me; in a country where it's estimated that 14 million people live in poverty, including 1 in 3 children, I found it especially difficult to swallow Cat's justification to work in private medicine, when her reasoning was that £100 a month isn't much to most families, just the equivalent of "a supper out or half a dozen bottles of average wine". Cat, who has previously been the moral centre of the novels, as set against Simon's emotional coldness and Richard's violence, was the greatest disappointment here. Not just leaving the NHS but her continued support for her proven domestic abuser and accused rapist father, she comes across as an almost entirely different person from previous novels.
These elements could be almost forgiven, though, if the writing was strong and the crime element as intriguing as previous books, but sadly neither is true. The murder on Taransay in which Simon becomes embroiled comes with a side of