Tom Rob Smith – The Farm

Review by showhost

This is the author of that great trilogy ‘child 44’.  This was an unusual format for a novel.  Daniels Parents when they retired, left England and bought an isolated farm in Sweden, the country where his mother, Tilde, was born.  The reason they said was to go back to basics and live off the land, being self-sufficient.

A phone call from his father shatters his life.  He tells Daniel that his mother is not well, she is dillusional, imagining and accusing people of terrible things and is in a mental hospital.  As Daniel makes plans to get to Sweden to find out what is going on his mother rings.  She has left the hospital and is on her way to him.  He is not to believe anything his father tells him, nor tell him that she is on her way to Heathrow.  She will explain everything when she sees him.

What follows through most of the book is a narrative of chronological events told by his mother, accompanied by pieces of evidence she has collected in her satchel.  She paints his father as being part of the conspiracy to have her institutionalised along with their neighbour Hakan.  Daniel has to decide who to believe.  There is a little change of scene half way through the story as they move location to evade his father, who has come to collect her. 

Daniel finally goes off to Sweden in search of the truth. 

This is totally different from Child 44.  Daniels partner is a bit player as well as his father really.  It is well written but strange and a strange ending.  I also found the conclusion with Mia a nothingness.