[REVIEW] Rebecca Godfrey, Under the Bridge
Nov. 9th, 2005 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe murder, in November of 1997, of 14 year old teenager Reena Virk in a suburb of the Britiss Columbian capital of Victoria, shocked Canadians. Her murder by drowning, eventually judged by the Canadian courts to have been the act of two persons, Kelly Marie Ellard and Warren Glowatsky, after she had been viciously beaten in a swarming by eight of her peers, highlighted uncomfortable issues of youth violence. Just what, Canadians wondered, had happened to these apparently ordinary suburban teens to make them criminals?
Canadian novelist Rebecca Godfrey's Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk, published just after Ellard's conviction for second-degree murder, is one of the first books to examine this case. Using the techniques of creative non-fiction deployed so effectively by Truman Capote in his 1966 In Cold Blood, Godfrey traces the different players in the Reena Virk drama, giving them life in the fullness of Godfrey's reconstruction (Reena Virk's desperate desire to belong, her attackers' different life traumas, the stunned witnesses) and setting them to work.
Under the Bridge is an effective reconstruction of the murder and its consequent dramas, and worth reading. Even so, my attention wasn't kept entirely by it. I blame the distracting CanLit prose, fragmented and fragmenting. In Cold Blood was so successful in part because it was held together by a single unbroken stream of commentary by a singular narrative persona. Under the Bridge is too late modern for this, alas.
Canadian novelist Rebecca Godfrey's Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk, published just after Ellard's conviction for second-degree murder, is one of the first books to examine this case. Using the techniques of creative non-fiction deployed so effectively by Truman Capote in his 1966 In Cold Blood, Godfrey traces the different players in the Reena Virk drama, giving them life in the fullness of Godfrey's reconstruction (Reena Virk's desperate desire to belong, her attackers' different life traumas, the stunned witnesses) and setting them to work.
Under the Bridge is an effective reconstruction of the murder and its consequent dramas, and worth reading. Even so, my attention wasn't kept entirely by it. I blame the distracting CanLit prose, fragmented and fragmenting. In Cold Blood was so successful in part because it was held together by a single unbroken stream of commentary by a singular narrative persona. Under the Bridge is too late modern for this, alas.
