The Girl on the Landing

“How comfortable that idea is: that everything wrong with the human race is the result of some malfunction, some microscopic chemical change in our brains, some evolutionary wrong turning in our genetic code.”

The Girl On The Landing is the third novel by British author, Paul Torday. For ten years, Elizabeth has been married to Michael Gascoigne, ten years that Elizabeth says “demonstrated that at least I had commitment, although in my bleaker moments I thought that it might just be inertia”. Michael, boring but very wealthy, decent and reliable, begins to change after a weekend in Ireland, and Elizabeth discovers a spontaneous, romantic man she wishes had been present for those early years. Even when she discovers the reason for this profound change, and the danger it poses, she is reluctant to give this new man up.

This novel has a rather slow-moving start, but this tempo reflects the tone of the Gascoigne marriage, and as later events are described, the pace certainly picks up. Torday uses a twin narrative: Michael, who is eventually revealed to be an unreliable narrator; and Elizabeth, whose perspective demonstrates just how easily one can be ignorant of the true nature of one’s partner. Torday touches on the covert racism of the English Gentleman’s Club, as well as the medical profession’s opinion of what is “normal”, mental disorders and the drugs used to treat them: “…what type of human can conceive that a drug which obliterates the patient’s identity so entirely is a cure for anything?”

Torday said he trying to find the “ultimate novel” and wrote compulsively: each of his seven novels is a different genre, and The Girl On The Landing has been described as a subtle ghost story. This edition also contains a reading guide and a preview of the next book Torday wrote: The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers. Said Charlie Summers makes a cameo appearance in this novel: Torday’s characters tend to do this. This thought-provoking novel is another brilliant Torday offering.