This Is How by M.J. Hyland

Recently I read This Is How by M.J.Hyland, another book from Amazon’s ‘Vine’ programme.  This is what I have to say about it…

This is one of the delights (for me) of the Amazon vine programme.  It is not just getting free stuff, although that is nice, obviously, it is about finding myself reading books I would probably never have thought to read.

I found this book to be an effortless read, and I suspect it takes a lot more work to make a book appear so simple than it is to write one full of flowery prose. Although written in a straightforward manner, there are still some almost poetic turns of phrase, showing that there was indeed a lot of thought put into something so apparently unadorned.

I really enjoyed the book partly because I had not read any reviews of it and so one major plot turn came as a total surprise. Anybody thinking of reading this should stop reading the reviews now to get the full enjoyment! There will be a few spoilers below, so be warned.

The publisher’s synopsis says how this is the story of a jilted young man packing everything up and going to live in a seaside town, and does not hint at what the story is really about. Some reviewers have noted this as a sort of complaint. I actually enjoyed the surprise element that gave the story at the end of part one.

In part one we see the protagonist arriving at the seaside town and realise that it is set in the 1960’s although that is not explicitly stated. This is something a book can do that a film can’t. It is strange to come across a reference to a particular model of MGB only having been in production for a couple of years and have to re-calibrate your mental images of all the scenes: to picture roads with less traffic, streets with fewer chainstores and plate glass windows and so on.

It all appears to be a straightforward, uneventful, but eminently readable story and then suddenly at the end of a chapter the main character, who we were getting to understand a bit suddenly kills somebody for no apparent reason.

The second part of the book then becomes the story of his time on remand and his court case, and the third part becomes the story of the beginning of his time in prison. At this point the period detail comes into play, as it looms large in everybody’s minds that the death penalty had only been removed a few years before and that Patrick Oxtoby would have been hanged if his crimes had been a few years ago.

Written is such a clear and simple style, this book nevertheless leads to all sorts of speculation. The main character had gone to university and given up after a year. It must have been quite unusual to even go to university at that time and especially so for anybody from an unprivileged background, so he must have been quite bright. He seemed to be awkward with women, but how much of that is his personality and how much the spirit of the times when sexual relationships before marriage were, if not less common, certrainly less public?

I had not heard of MJ Hyland before, but after this I will probably hunt down some of her other books.