Underwater - Elizabeth Diamond

Initially, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of mystery or suspense about Underwater – initially there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of anything in the novel’s rather commonplace situation of Jane’s life. It’s the humdrum and somewhat bleak stuff of recovering from a serious illness, family troubles, a difficult childhood, a ruined marriage and a disabled son – far too many things that Jane finds hard to deal with. Any yet, there’s something that tugs gently, first on Jane and then on the reader – and at the bottom of it is a missing brother that starts to trouble her dreams and who could hold the key to acknowledging the truth of her past and perhaps finding a way out of her unhappy loneliness.

The writing is quite simple, the dialogue ordinary and commonplace, the storyline a little bit melodramatic and… well… very much dealing with women’s issues (feelings, emotions, relationships, family matters), but Elizabeth Diamond does explore these areas so well that even though you can work out where it is going by about half-way through, it still manages to be quite readable. Expertly piecing the fragments of Jane’s life back together, Underwater not only convincingly builds up the psychological and emotional make-up of her characters and how they relate to each other, but the novel also has something to say about the nature of life, changes and moving on – getting old, dealing with the past and discovering who you really are.