Review: The Kind Man by Susan Hill

In a previous review, I've mentioned the difficulties authors must face when trying to follow up on a huge literary hit.

Just as pop artists must struggle to live up to that big number one, still played at office parties twenty years later, so it must be a similar challenge for writers who have knocked out a story which instantly became a modern classic.

Susan Hill's The Woman in Black is a universally acclaimed ghost story which sits proudly alongside the work of MR James and Charles Dickens, when it comes to a beautifully constructed and truly scary supernatural fiction. Although Hill has since become a very successful crime writer, she has also turned out a number of other ghost stories and, in my humble opinion, none have come close to the giddying highs of Eel Marsh House and its creepy inhabitant.

Now it is not for me to suggest that her subsequent efforts have failed in their intention - indeed, she might have been aiming for something distinctly different from The Woman in Black, in which case she has succeeded. But as a reader, I found her second-to-latest book, The Small Hand, to be disappointing and I'm afraid I feel the same way about The Kind Man.

To be fair, I don't think this is meant to be a ghost story. I'm not entirely sure what it is meant to be, but I'm pretty certain it's not meant to be frightening, so fair enough. Thought-provoking it most certainly is.

Set in a poor rural village in some indistinct time in the past, The Kind Man follows the story of a young woman who marries a nice chap and settles down to humble working class life. While her sister turns out several children, only to sink into depression and lovelessness, the woman has one daughter who later dies.

The grief-stricken couple attempt to go on with her lives, but things take an even worse turn when her husband loses his job and develops cancer. But there seems to be a miracle in store for them both - a miracle which will have far-reaching and unforeseeable consequences.

I'll be honest - I got bored with this story. It is immensely well-written, but the pace was slow, even for such a short novel, and I was a bit irritated by the apparent moral that kicked in towards the end. I also didn't really understand the connection between their daughter's death and the husband's experience. Although I could guess at it, I found that I didn't really care because the story didn't seem to fit together properly in my mind.

A great story should leave you feeling equally fulfilled and bereft when the final page is turned. Unfortunately, the characters in The Kind Man were not compelling enough to capture me and as the story also failed on that point, I was quite relieved to be able to put the book down and move on to something else.