TANGERINE CHRISTINE MANGAN FREE

TANGERINE CHRISTINE MANGAN FREE

As Alice tries to break free of her controlling husband, her staunch but snobbish aunt and her manipulative friend Lucy, Tangier is doing likewise from the empire. The comparisons are heavy-handed at times. In alternate first-person chapters, they each fill in the mystery of their boarding school years, while simultaneously negotiating the strained current climate of their friendship. From the beginning, however, Mangan establishes that all is not well between the girls. Unhappily married and confined to a gloomy house in a foreign country, Alice should welcome the arrival of Lucy (orphan two), her old roommate at Bennington.

There are a number of elements that elevate Mangan’s story from the above, most obviously the novel’s primary setting in 1950s Tangier where Alice (orphan one) has relocated on the whim of her new husband John. The recipe is as follows: take one orphaned teenager, send her to boarding school in Vermont, have her strike up an intense friendship with another orphaned teenager, add a mysterious tragedy, skip forward a few years to where orphan one is living in confinement, “trying hard not to think while secretly thinking as hard as I can”, as she attempts to set down her tale. It is not by any stretch a poor novel, rather a fairly decent first-time offering whose ingredients have proved too tempting for publishers hoping for a bestseller. Compared by its publishers to Gone Girl and The Secret History, it lacks the suspense of the former and the literary ability of the superior Donna Tartt. It is huge hype for a debut to live up to, and sadly Tangerine cannot handle the weight.

It has since been optioned for film by George Clooney's production company, with Scarlett Johansson billed as the star. Christine Mangan's debut novel was the subject of a bidding war in the US, where Harper Collins bought it for a reported $1.1 million.

With its Hitchcockian cover and an atmospheric prologue that imagines a man's bird-pecked body recovered from the sea, Tangerine lures the reader into its story with the promise of being every publisher's dream – the literary thriller.

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