Ascendant novelist J.B. Blackwood is on a cruise with her husband, Patrick, to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Patrick is older than J.B., formerly her professor, now a film director and cult figure. But now his success is starting to wane and J.B. is on the cusp of winning a major literary prize. Her art has been forever overseen by him; now it may overshadow his. For days they sail in the sun, nothing but dark water all around them. Then a storm hits and Patrick falls from the ship. J.B. is left alone as the search for what happened to Patrick—and the truth about their marriage—begins.
The first half of the novel is eventful and atmospheric. J.B. describes the circumstances of her life...with what feels like an eerie calm. Yet this narration turns deliciously complex when the known facts are reshaped as J.B. returns to them with increasing honesty and nuance. In its latter half, The Anniversary grows into a feminist commentary on the nature of mysteries and marriages ... In a virtuosic move, Bishop allows her narrator to recall the early days of their relationship in a romantic way only briefly before revealing the grotesqueness of the power imbalance between the lovers ... The insights throughout the novel, especially the second half, are astute and affecting...but the reader might feel wearied by their volume. The meta-conversation in the book is smart...but it also swamps the action and leaves the novel a little unbalanced and unsatisfying ... Similar to contemporary books like Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies in the ways it tackles gender and power, but it offers the pleasures of the Gothic novel too.
The disintegration is engrossingly extreme and appropriately public ... Bishop’s presiding achievement in The Anniversary is to have created a psychologically layered landscape that simultaneously holds in suspension and keeps in play the crime-genre structure of the book – with its sudden death, investigation, evasions and reckoning all ultimately accomplished. She weaves J. B.’s present woes with memories of her stormy marriage and a shattering disappearance that disrupted her childhood, resulting in similarly unexpected intrusions of the police, press and public. The author accomplishes this feat via a smooth shuttling from present to past ... Stephanie Bishop honours the feminist spin she puts on the crime genre by revisiting the on-deck fight, revealing the underlying reason for her narrator’s disappointment.
The opening sequence...is electrifying ... JB joins the growing ranks of dissociated narrators, telling her own story at a numb remove ... The problem with this approach, however realistic, is that it keeps the reader at a frustrating distance too ... We finally return to the meat of what happened between JB and Patrick on page 280, and the pace picks up again at last. For me, though, the price paid — those 200 pages of elegant obfuscation — was simply too high.
