Three Hours – Rosamund Lupton, Viking, 2020
Take a look at the blurb. It’s a siege. It’s a school siege, in winter, in rural England. It opens with a gunshot and an injury.
And it’s the most uplifting book I have read in years.
Not because there is no hazard. Not because everything just works out wonderfully and all the good people are fine and all the bad people aren’t. I’m not going to tell you any of that (although I will let you into one secret: this was the first time in thirty years or more where I’ve had to jump forward twenty pages or so and find out what was going to happen). You don’t need to know it, and to an extent, it doesn’t even matter.
What matters is this:
Psychopaths aren’t interesting.
We’ve been fed a diet of psychopaths. We’ve been taught almost to revere them, in their difference, to be fascinated by them, but they’re not interesting. They are less than the rest of us. They are rare, and their deeds may be horrific, but they’re not interesting.
What’s interesting is the rest of us. Ordinary people. Kind people. Brave people. Decent people. People who, when put to the test, think not only of themselves. People far more complex and wonderful than any psychopath. And here, in a book which can’t help telling us a little something about psychopaths, Rosamund Lupton does something extraordinary:
She tells us to ignore them.
Yes, sometimes, we have no choice. Like Rose Polstein, Lupton’s police psychologist assigned to getting into the gunman’s mind, we have to understand what we can about the psychopaths, but only so that we can see why; only so that we can protect the wonderful, ordinary people.
And it is the ordinary people to whom Lupton has given a voice. They may tremble but they do not cower; they may bleed but they will not surrender; their minds may be all but torn apart in shock and fear, but they are always better than those who would terrorise them. They may feel terror, but more than that, they feel love. They have been drowned out, by our obsession with the monstrous, but here they sing, so powerfully that it feels as if their voice might drown out the wicked and their deeds in turn. Beth and Hannah and Rafi and the rest of them – these are characters who will live long in the memory.
Yes, it’s a book about a school siege, and it’s an unrelenting, scary, tense thriller. But it’s also a book about love and human relationships, and it’s an astonishing, powerful, uplifting triumph of a novel.