Jennifer Haigh: Mrs Kimble

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Actually, there are three Mrs Kimbles — serially, that is — over about 30 years in the life of the enigmatic, villainous Ken Kimble. Haigh devotes about a third of her novel to each wife, in three riveting studies of very different women who are hooked at vulnerable periods of their lives by a man whose identity is as slippery and malleable as the lies he compulsively tells about himself.

Why do nice women form attachments to men everyone else can see are dangerous? Haigh explores the baffling logic that lies at the core of so many relationships, and twists the kaleidoscope on the fantasy of love that each of these women share.

The novel reads as compellingly as a thriller, the comparison encouraged by the man-shaped mystery at its core. We never do get the lowdown on Ken Kimble, and there are no neat answers about why he is as he is — and while he's manipulative and chillingly controlling, we're never quite sure how far he'll go.

Birdie was just 18 when she became pregnant to her 32-year-old choirmaster, a preacher at a conservative Christian Bible College. This is our villain, Ken Kimble, who starts out charming but eventually leaves her and their two children, in the company of yet another 18-year-old.

We meet Birdie shortly after this abandonment. It's 1969 in Virginia, and she's fallen into helpless despair, less able to cope than her 6-year-old son Charlie (whose story runs through the book in
contrast to his hated father's) and turns increasingly to bottles of cheap wine.

Poor Birdie: the writing she inspires is heart-stoppingly powerful and, like her hungry, embarrassed son, we cringe for her as she stumbles around the corner shop or hides in her wardrobe as social workers knock at her door.

Ken Kimble appears in person in the second section, in Florida later that same year, in tow with that 18-year-old but soon latching on, instead, to Joan, a wealthy former career woman. Recently struck down by breast cancer, she's newly uncertain about the world and, therefore, ripe for the picking by someone like Kimble.

Next scene: Washington DC, 1979, and Kimble literally runs into his third wife, Dinah. We've also met her before — she was the babysitter, back in his former life with Birdie, which provides both pleasing circularity, and inevitability that Kimble's past will catch up him. Their 15-year marriage eventually leads to an inescapable and slightly treacly denouement.

The ending is a little neat, but the journey is utterly captivating. Haigh's gift for intuiting her characters, and the imaging of lives in tensely constructed vignettes, make this something special. Recommended.

Publisher: HarperCollins

Price: $24.99