Blair's Reviews > Penance

The setting of Penance (a Northern seaside town in decline), the crux of the plot (what is the truth about a notorious murder that took place seven years ago?), and the format (a mixed-media approach incorporating lots of interviews) all make it feel like a long-lost cousin of the Six Stories series, though here the medium is a true-crime book written by a shifty journalist – think Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story – rather than a podcast. The crime at its centre is the gruesome death of a teenager after she was set on fire by three classmates. Like an ever-growing number of modern novels about murder, it’s concerned with the mechanics of true crime and how ‘true’ it ever really is, though I don’t think Clark’s concern lies as much with the ‘ethics of true crime’ as it does with the messiness of ‘the truth’ and how we come to decide what we believe. What is truth, really, when there is no single tidy, complete version of a story?

But more than that, and above all, it’s a book about teenage girlhood. The plasticity of identities at this age; how friendships can so easily curdle into enmity (or, really, were only ever enmity in the first place). How a strange idea – a piece of local folklore, or something from the internet – can fatefully take hold. How all this continues to define a person for years to come, maybe even forever: as one character says, ‘there’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager, isn’t there?’ And it’s even more specifically about the experience of the late-millennial, borderline-Gen-Z micro-generation whose adolescence coincided with the boom years of Tumblr.

Penance doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Boy Parts because it isn’t driven by a single voice. Yet it’s more immediately a book I want to reread, a book I’m already looking forward to revisiting. I can’t get enough of the method of telling a story like this through a multitude of accounts: when they’re written well (and this is) these are one of my favourite types of books, such an effective way of getting under the skin of a place/community/event/anything, really. Clark also seamlessly folds elements of online culture into the story, something that’s easy to get wrong but here rings true. I’m all for more layered, choral, shifting-truth narratives like this: I love Six Stories, I loved this one (I’d honestly be delighted if this turned into a series as well), I hope it’s huge and sparks off a whole new wave of them.

I received an advance review copy of Penance from the publisher through NetGalley.