Penance is an interesting book. When I started it, I thought it’d be one of the best things I read this year: a clever dissection of true crime fandom. And by the end, I couldn’t wait to be done. Even the clever ending didn’t spruce it up for me.
I appreciate what Eliza Clark is trying to do: expand on a crime to look at the broader story through the lens of a journalist who we know from the start is unreliable, which requires we approach the work with a skeptic’s view point. I’m game for that. I’m also game for the fictional English seaside town Clark builds and its history.
But Clark goes so far adrift of the story that after the exciting first third, it just sags. And I get the point she is trying to make: true crime shouldn’t be about a tantalizing narrative but a larger look at people’s lives in The System. That’s fine, it just doesn’t make for good reading. It’s a high concept that punches way too high.
It’s not the varied characters or the semi-related tangents or the deep deep dive into local lore; it’s that all of these things are poorly organized for the broader point. Yeah you can stick your finger in the eye of true crime lovers and good for you (and Clark is kind of doing that with herself as well, the “author” of the book’s name is an anagram for her own name). But you can also do it while making it interesting. At a certain point, this story sails so far adrift of its original focus that by the time Clark brought it home, I stopped caring.
It’s a book that might be worth a revisit some day. Clark’s got talent and I can appreciate what she’s doing here. But the execution felt off.
