The Girl On the Landing
Paul Torday
Book notes
Magazine journalist Elizabeth Bently doesn’t embark on her marriage to Michael Gascoigne with any great enthusiasm. In fact, on the day of the wedding, she realises that it wouldn’t break her heart if he didn’t turn up at the church. But she considers him an acceptable match for what she imagines will be a ‘workable’ marriage: a wealthy landowner with a 30,000-acre Scottish estate and a flat in London. He may be withdrawn - dull, even - and spend too much time on his duties as membership secretary of the pompous gentleman’s club he belongs to, but he is dependable and unlikely to run off with a younger model (unlike Elizabeth’s father). After ten years of fairly lacklustre married life, Michael suddenly begins to change. At first, his behaviour is unsettling, then inspiring. He becomes animated, romantic, impulsive and passionate - and Elizabeth falls in love with him in the way she wished it had been from the start. But as she investigates the reasons for her husband’s unexpected transformation, Elizabeth gradually uncovers disturbing secrets from his past which, in a heart-pounding climax, put her life in danger. This is an exciting novel – part love story, part psychological thriller – which confounds your expectations as it tightens its grip.
About the author
Paul Torday was born in 1946 and read English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. He spent the next 30 years working in industry. This involved frequent travel to the Far East and the Middle East and South America and sitting in airports or on planes reading novels to kill the time. Maybe this was why he decided to try something different and take up writing himself, at the age of 60. After a couple of false starts - and two novels that went straight into the drawer - he burst on to the literary scene in 2007 with his first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, an immediate bestseller that has been sold in 24 countries. He followed that with The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, a black comedy about addiction. The Girl on the Landing is his third book. He lives in the Northumbrian countryside close to the River North Tyne and is keen to write books that show some glimpses of the way life is lived in the country and the people that live there. When not writing he enjoys fishing and other country sports. He is married with a grown up family.
Discussion points
1. What is the significance of the book’s title?
2. Are Elizabeth’s reasons for marrying Michael convincing?
3. Is it conceivable that she would marry someone about whom she knows so little?
4. One of the book’s major themes is the diverse ethnic background of the British. How does this relate to the current immigration debate?
5. Where do you think the author’s sympathies lie over the issue of Mr Patel’s membership of Grouchers?
6. The book starts out as a portrait of a marriage and ends as a tense thriller. Is the change of gear successfully accomplished?
7. Medication suppresses the bad side of Michael’s character, but also the passionate side. So is the book arguing for or against mind-altering drugs?
8. When do you first suspect that Michael is not all he seems?
9. Could Michael and Elizabeth’s son inherit his father’s characteristics? What does the future hold for Elizabeth?
10. ‘None of us knows who we really are,’ repeats a voice at one point. Do you think this is true?
Author's view
I didn’t plan to write Girl On The Landing. It just happened to me.
The book begins with Michael – the novel’s ‘hero’ – studying a mysterious painting of a girl in eighteenth century dress, standing in the shadows of a landing.
I really did see a painting of a girl on a landing, hanging in an old house somewhere. It so intrigued me – the upright attitude of the girl, face half hidden in shadows, the white marble angel with bowed head next to her – that it nagged away at me until I started to write a story about it.
As the novel began to take shape, and I had invented the character of Michael, I found it pulling me in different directions. The first element was the story of Michael, a man whose real personality has been suppressed by medication, and who finally begins to understand who - and what - he really is. From this flowed a second theme about identity: who the British really are, and how our national preoccupation with diversity masks the fact that our own origins are far more complex than some of us imagine.
Then I rediscovered Michael through the eyes of the second main character, his wife Elizabeth. She realises that, while you might think you know someone, you never really do. It is the ultimate unknowability of other people that intrigues us, frustrates us and -sometimes – frightens us, in our relationships.
So this is a book about identity, and about madness too and the way we respond to it by trying to extinguish it with drugs rather than trying to understand and to adjust to other people’s view of reality. And when, as it very rarely but sometimes does, madness turns to evil then it raises the question: where does evil come from? Is it within us - the ghost in the machine - and can it be cured by a pill, as the drug companies believe; or does it come from somewhere else outside ourselves? And, if so, who or what brings it?
Girl On The Landing is in part a thriller – the gradual, unnerving discovery by Elizabeth that her once rather boring and priggish husband is metamorphosing in front of her; that someone or some thing has crept into his life. How else can she account for the changes that are taking place within him? And what is he changing into? At first the changes are positive - here is someone she loves much more than the man she married. But, too soon, the changes become more sinister…..
And it is a novel about the way we respond to people who are not ‘normal’ or who in other ways are outside of the mainstream: a subject that I find endlessly fascinating. I hope readers do too.