Review: The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place by C.J. Tudor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved C. J. Tudor's debut novel, THE CHALK MAN, and I love the second novel, THE HIDING PLACE. Strumming the tension maximally from first page to last, the author makes us understand the characters, feel their emotions, comprehend their motives, rail against injustice, and wish everything could simply have been different from the beginning. In other words, Life. Joe Thorn, our narrator/protagonist, is not so much a feckless hero as a failed hero. Coming of age in a small Nottinghamshire community, a community which had existed for centuries, Joe was an adolescent when the local mine closed and his father had to find other employment. A mine collapse in 1949 had cast its continuing pall over the community, but the real danger lay not in the mine, but in the underground adjacent to the failed colliery.

Author Tudor superbly suspends disbelief in weaving in elements of the supernatural, or perhaps "preternatural," along with the life stories of the village, of these boys and girls grown to adulthood who persist in the patterns of their childhood and raise their children to repeat their failings. Following historian George Santayana's premise, "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it," the inhabitants of this village manage to sometimes remember and frequently, generation after generation, to repeat. Reading THE HIDING PLACE is tough and painful in that we are required to live vicariously through our less-than-perfect characters, but so much of good fiction (and nonfiction) means just that: diving below the superfluity of surface currents and seeing--living--in the depths.

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