{"id":4953,"date":"2014-03-06T12:08:33","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T12:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4953"},"modified":"2014-03-13T10:46:20","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T10:46:20","slug":"the-night-guest-by-fiona-mcfarlane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4953","title":{"rendered":"The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a>Published by Sceptre 16 January 2014<\/span><\/p>\n

288pp, hardback,<\/span> \u00a314.99<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Zo\u00eb Fairbairns<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019re in your eighties, living alone in a large, isolated house by the sea. Your husband, whom you loved, is dead. Your adult children keep in touch by phone. \u00a0<\/span>You\u2019re fine really \u2013 apart from occasional memory lapses. Apart from the tiger which prowls around your house at night.<\/span><\/p>\n

You haven\u2019t actually seen the tiger, a species which is not native to your part of the world (New South Wales, Australia) \u2013 but you know it is there, from the noises it makes as it rubs against your furniture, from the smells it emits, from the fear it arouses.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the predicament of Ruth in Fiona McFarlane\u2019s eerie end-of-life novel The Night Guest.<\/em> It\u2019s the lady and the tiger \u2013 or, to be more precise, a tiger and two ladies.\u00a0 <\/span>Ruth has a home help, the competent and apparently-caring Frida, who prepares Ruth\u2019s food, protects her from the tiger, keeps the house clean, and ever so gently takes over the management of Ruth\u2019s finances. Frida\u2019s origins are shrouded in mystery \u2013 is she really, as she claims, a government employee? Is she secretly financed by Ruth\u2019s sons, who are genuinely concerned about their mother and who have sent Frida as a carer and a spy? Or is Frida something more sinister, malignant, criminal, supernatural, or all of the above? <\/span><\/p>\n

Read this disturbing and powerful magical-realist thriller and find out. \u00a0<\/span>It\u2019s edge-of-the-rocking-chair stuff, as we follow events through the point of view of a woman who on her good days is alert, assertive, kind, canny and sexy.\u00a0 <\/span>On less good days, she is confused and ill, perhaps hallucinating, perhaps living beyond the grave. Ruth doesn\u2019t want to leave her beautiful home for the confines of some protective institution for the elderly \u2013 who would? But who is to protect her from the tiger, who is to protect her from her protectors?<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, I must stop. It\u2019s late at night, I\u2019m alone in the house, and I think I just heard a noise from downstairs…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Zo\u00eb Fairbairns<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the lady and the tiger \u2013 or, to be more precise, a tiger and two ladies. Ruth has a home help, the competent and apparently-caring Frida, who prepares Ruth\u2019s food, protects her from the tiger, keeps the house clean, and ever so gently takes over the management of Ruth\u2019s finances. Frida\u2019s origins are shrouded in mystery \u2013 is she really, as she claims, a government employee? […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4953"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4968,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4953\/revisions\/4968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}