Most of the book details Jen’s attempts to coax her teenager into opening up and revealing what has happened during her disappearance. The desperate love of a parent for a child they cannot know is wonderfully true to life, and despite the rather bleak set-up, there are a lot of very funny moments ... And the ending, in which Jen retraces her daughter’s actual footsteps, feels both cathartic and satisfying—more so than any high-concept shock twist could have been.
It is in these moments, the small changes Jen notices, the longing for communication and understanding, where Healey’s writing is at its best—eliciting compassion for both characters in their respective miseries, even as they seem to dance around each other ... Healey writes a nuanced portrait of a woman both obsessed by her daughter’s wellbeing and simultaneously resentful of the 'Supermum' label that seems to taunt her from a garish office mug ... Jen does, eventually, discover what took place. There are some distracting mythological digressions, as Jen ruthlessly explores every possibility, every angle, every potential clue, and tantalising hints at the supernatural are never fully developed. The novel’s real strength, though, lies in its examination of such intimate familial ties and the incredulity that in a world of Google Earth, rolling news and endless online discussion groups, something—a mystery—could still go unmapped.
While the focus of the novel is Lana, Healey also makes readers suspicious of its unreliable narrator, Jen. Lana may be unstable, but readers are subtly reminded to question concepts like 'sanity' as Jen teeters on the brink of madness herself. The shock and stress of living with a suicidal, self-mutilating daughter bends Jen’s mind into an ever-darker state ... How does a reader trust someone who cannot trust herself? That is the central question of this novel. The writing will make readers feel like everyone is a little insane ... Healey’s skill as a writer is laudable for the way she manipulates the English language so that words and the meanings attached to them suddenly become slippery ... Whistle in the Dark is not to be missed.
The crime detection is mixed in with the social satire of modern family life and middle-class motherhood ... It is a courageous attempt at generic hybridity on Healey’s part and the two elements of the book are, by turns, intriguing and entertaining. But blended together the effect is odd and inconsistent, veering from Jen’s gothic fantasies of what might have happened to Lana, to flipness of tone and comic dialogue ... The satire is the stronger component of the two: Healey’s middle-class family is drawn with canny-eyed clarity ... The most compelling aspect of the novel, though, is the painful pathos in Jen and Lana’s relationship ... In the end, it is this interpersonal drama and not the clever narrative tics that Healey employs, nor the generic innovation, that gives the novel its heart.
There’s a lot that’s dark and downbeat about this book, but Healey pulls us out of the doldrums by way of her sparkling characterisations. Lana is such a realistic teenager, exuding attitude and full of put downs for her parents, and her mother in particular. She is the central point from which everything else radiates, and Healey never shies away from tackling the issues that come hand in hand with teenage depression ... Healey has a literary style which is in turns pleasing and frustrating. Don’t expect any fast pacing; instead, prepare yourself for a modest meander. The choppy chapter lengths are also a little disconcerting. They can range from several pages long to a mere sentence and contribute to a feeling of disorientation ... beautifully written, but the plot is sketchy and the final denouement may disappoint. You’ll spend much of the book thinking something exciting is bound to happen on the next page, but somehow it never does.
The problem is that it never quite makes up its mind about what kind of book it’s aiming to be. It’s structured, and framed, as a classic 'grip-lit' psychological thriller, and yet the reader waits many pages between clues, and suspense fails to build. Add to that, the relentless mother-daughter conflict steers the narrative away from the domain of the thriller, and into coming-of-age and familial drama territory. Still, it must be said, this the most literary of commercial fiction outings, with exquisite attention to detail and a masterful depiction of family tension. The portrait of mental illness that emerges is harrowing and haunting, a testament to both Healey’s considerable talent and her courage in tapping her own life experiences, having herself contemplated suicide in her youth.
Clues and red herrings come thick and fast, but the narrative doesn’t work as a thriller because nothing sinister or surprising happens. The main players, whose favorite activities are making endless cups of tea, whingeing and having no sense of humour, are hard to love. None has any interesting ideas about the many weighty subjects the plot touches on (mental health, art, motherhood, religion). The familiar trope of a local spooky legend—this time about missing children visiting the Underworld—is put to its habitual use of adding a bit of cultural depth and the chance of things going all magic realism. And where some authors stick in a moody crow or fox to add weirdness, Healey goes for a mysterious cat. This is truly contemporary British fiction by numbers.
Healey...fashions this novel in titled sections, ranging in length from a few lines to a few pages, a technique that advances the narration, along with flashbacks, while eliminating extraneous details and building suspense naturally. The result is an absorbing view of a family, with the emphasis on the mother-daughter connection, in which—flaws aside—love shines through.
Healey makes Whistle fresh and surprising by connecting Lana’s recovery from the trauma of her disappearance to the painful reckoning of her mother, Jen, who is equally lost ... Like her first book, Whistle is a hybrid of psychological thriller and domestic drama with a protagonist whose viewpoint is unreliable and a set of mothers and daughters whose relationships feel complicated and real. Healey is especially sharp on the specifics of the bond between Lana and Jen.
With echoes of Demeter’s rescue of Persephone, Jen’s investigation into what happened over those four days becomes a quest to understand her daughter’s mental illness and accept her broken memories. Healey beautifully depicts Lana’s sense of unease in her own body ... Along the way, Jen must face her own psychological quirks (including possibly imaginary cats) and walk in Lana’s footsteps. An exquisite portrait of a mother’s healing love for her troubled daughter.
