The Fog
by Brooke Hardwick
Simon & Schuster
Brooke Hardwick went to a writers’ retreat in the former home of poet Ted Hughes – the husband of Sylvia Plath, who is said to haunt the home where the retreat was being held.
In The Fog, Kate is accepted into a ten-day therapeutic writers’ retreat for people with writer’s block on the remote island of Rathlin in the freezing Irish Sea. The retreat is advertised as a radical course that will change lives.
The stately stone manor house, shrouded in fog, on the wild, remote Atlantic island is an equally eerie setting for Kate to be able to heal her trauma and the resultant loss of memory, and begin to write again.
Kate is plagued by nightmares and memories she can’t unravel and needs to unlock her past in order to write again. Desperate to understand the breakdown of her marriage, Kate is determined to leave the retreat with answers.
Cormac, the retreat’s director, uses the unusual mythology of the island to focus on the block rather than the writing … but it would appear that these mythological forces are getting a bit of human intervention.
As the temperature plummets and the strange therapy intensifies, Kate’s flashes of memory begin to congeal and she realises that the past hides a frightening truth.
Before arriving on the island, Kate managed to keep secrets hidden from herself – “they were in my dreams, in the corners of the house I kept in the dark. But now they were coming back. Shards of the past were hurting again.”
As the pace of the narrative intensifies and revelations send it in multiple directions, it is difficult to put the book down. There are forces at work that Kate cannot control – or can she?
The reader is left thinking about why we omit some things from our memory, but hold onto other things, and delude ourselves to continue living.
Lezly Herbert
