Review: Lay Me Down - Nicci Cloke

A guest review by Jayne White

I have to admit that my initial reaction to this book wasn’t very positive. I saw the cover which features the back view of a male and female couple on opposite edges of the frame both gazing out across the water to a misty view of the Golden Gate bridge; I read the strapline ‘What if the past won’t let you go?’; I thought ‘Why on earth has the Fop given me this?’ The introductory blurb didn’t look very promising either as it launched with ‘What if you can’t outrun your past?’ However, since I’d agreed to review it in advance I persevered and I’m pleased to say that the old adage ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ does hold true in this case.

Lay Me Down features leading characters Jack and Elsa. They are in a fairly new relationship in London when Jack, who has dual UK / US citizenship, gets his dream job working on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and they decide that she should go out there with him for a few months to see if their relationship has a chance. When they’re in San Francisco Jack is drawn into the camaraderie of his co-workers and is affected by encounters with people who have chosen to come to the bridge to throw themselves off it, whilst Elsa becomes a bit of a lost soul who doesn’t quite know what to do with herself. The novel then effectively becomes a character study by heavily featuring chapters set in the past so we can see the moments in their lives which are influencing their behaviour in their current situation. These continue to alternate with the present day action throughout the book.

The quality of the writing here is good - in places, very good, particularly with scene setting. I was really sold on how the New Year party scene at the beginning was written with Elsa hearing snatches of conversations as she moved through the crowd.

“Treading water in the swells of warped sound, she grasps at words as they pass

I said to him, I said you can go and f

I love this song

Hey isn’t that the guy

and he said he didn’t give a sh

I don’t get it though, how can pants be out of control

but they blur too quickly back into one, the threads slipping away.”

The chapter concerning Jack’s wedding to his first wife is told as a series of memories:

“He is at the altar, sweat beading at his temples. It’s too hot for April, too small in the church. People fan themselves with sheets of primrose-yellow paper, the orders of service. A baby begins to cry in one of the pews near the back. And then there is her…”

Also noteworthy are Jack’s encounters with the people on the brink of jumping from the bridge as he’s struggling with his own issues:

“He feels the woman’s breath, hot on his neck. The hot breath becomes wet as her teeth pierce his skin. ‘Stop fighting,’ he tells her, and suddenly, finally, he hears the words himself.”

There are themes of guilt and loss and fear and despair threaded throughout the book and the ending brings the book full circle by ending the past narratives with the couple meeting for the first time.

One consequence of featuring the back stories so heavily in the book is that it’s natural to engage with both characters as individuals rather than engage with their disintegrating relationship to each other. However, this book is being marketed as a love story which encourages the expectation that the relationship will be at the centre of the story. I can’t help thinking that the cover and the blurb supplied by the publisher won’t help this book find its readership.

In pre-internet days as long as the book made sales it didn’t really matter what the reader thought of the book once they’d paid for it. Nowadays with goodreads and amazon reviews being so popular with readers, marketing decisions can backfire horribly, with readers giving public drubbings to interesting books. I may be wrong, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if the author had been ‘Nick’ Cloke, rather than Nicci, the approach would have been different.

Jayne is a freelance copywriter and editor. Follow her on Twitter @ElethaWhite