Review - WHAT SHE LEFT, T.R. Richmond

WHAT SHE LEFT has created a record in these parts as one of the most picked up and put down, unable to continue books that this reader has struggled with for quite some time. Part of the reason for pressing on is that it was a review book, but the more pressing reason became why was it so difficult to read.

An interesting idea, WHAT SHE LEFT uses the idea that the digital trail left by somebody these days could be investigated, explored as part of an Anthropologist's field of study. Building that idea into a mystery / crime format therefore tends to scream that there is a crime here to be solved. And obviously from the start, Alice Salmon is a twenty-five year old woman who died falling off a bridge in her university town in suspicious circumstances. For reasons that appear somewhat bizarre one of her old professor's decides as his memorial to her / anthropological undertaking, to track her life through her diary, blogs, notes, emails and letters - from childhood through to the night of her death.

Part of the problem with this motivation is that it's hard to avoid the slight feeling of creepiness about it, to say nothing of the overwhelming sense, from page one, that there's probably an ulterior motive at play here. Which is most definitely not assisted by the device of putting the Professor's voice in letters of his own as they not only didn't ring true, there was something artificial about the tone, reeking of "unreliable narrator that wants you to know it".

Which now presented this reader with a double dose of difficulty. Not only does the "hero" of the piece, Dr Jeremy Cook feel suspiciously like a bit of a weirdo stalker, but the voice of the heroine, the dead girl Alice Salmon is littered with ironic references and portent so thick it wouldn't have been much worse if there'd been big arrows in the margins to boot. 

Whilst it seems, on the face of it, a continuation of a standard historical methodology, seeking to understand an existence from the clues in their correspondence, and memorabilia, the problem with WHAT SHE LEFT is the same as the one that you often find when your Great Uncle has suddenly decided that his life is worth documenting, and you're the lucky person tasked with transcribing the notes. There's a sinking, desperate need to be anywhere else, and a stark reminder that some things are best left unsaid.