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Draft:The Fall

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Introduction

The Fall is a novel by the British author Rachael Blok, published by Head of Zeus Ltd, on the 14th of September 2022. The novel is set in the town of St. Albans, England, where in the space of 24 hours, two people fall from the tower of the town’s cathedral, leaving the police mystified and the rest of the town demanding answers. While investigating the falls, DCI Maarten Jensen discovers the secrets and truths behind the city and the two “accidents”.

Plot

Joel Braxtons hangs from the cathedral tower of his home town, crying out for someone to save his life. As a result of his own actions more than 50 years ago, Joel falls to his death, despite his calls for help. Willow Eliot, who is preparing for an exhibition at the cathedral the following day, blames herself for confusing Joel’s dying screams for piercing, howling winds blowing around the cathedral. The police suspect suicide.

Despite the fall, the exhibition goes ahead. What’s more, Willow’s sister Fliss and police officer Sunny are to be married in the same cathedral just days after the fall. During the weekend, the Eliot family, including Willow, Fliss, their mother and their grandmother, are staying at a B&B, owned by an older lady called Martha. Alongside the main story, there is also the story of a troublesome little girl named Alice, from the 1960s.

During a party for the exhibition, the Eliot sisters have a row, which results in Fliss running away from the event. Willow tries not to think about their extremely heated argument, and gets on with the exhibition. Shortly after making a speech at the exhibition, screams echo around the cathedral - someone is hanging from the roof of the cathedral. Quickly the crowd below realises it’s cathedral worker Noah. In contrast to the first fall, Noah shouts out “...pushed me”, which eliminates the suspicion of a suicide.

The investigation starts: one death and an attempted murder in the same place. The police talk to everyone involved, Willow, Fliss’s ex Theo and Joel Braxton’s son, Micheal Braxton, and his family. This is when the secrets start spilling out. Micheal’s brother Ferdie and his son Jaz, another cathedral worker, had had a falling out with Joel. Soon the investigation becomes even more complicated as people realise that Fliss is missing, and the question arises: could these three cases be connected?

The police find Fliss’s bag and phone, smashed up, leaving them even more worried about her all alone in the cold and the dark. Willow starts to blame herself for her sister’s disappearance because of their heated fight. In parallel to the first storyline, readers find out about Alice, and how her behaviour gets her in trouble with her father. While Willow and the police are out looking for Fliss, they see a suspicious figure throwing letters into a lake. They chase the figure and catch him, pulling up his hood to reveal Jaz, who is also Micheal Braxton’s nephew.

The police find out that the cathedral cleaner, Lizzie, witnessed another fall from the tower back in the 1960s. They bring her in for questioning and she tells them what she can remember. She tells them how a woman had fallen from the tower and that her daughter was still up in the tower, looking down at her mother. We find out that that little girl was Alice, and that people thought she pushed her mother, resulting in her father placing her in a home, Hill Barnes. Later in the book we find out that while Alice and her mother had gone up into the tower, Joel had followed them and forced himself on the mother, resulting in her falling down, and dying.

The letters Jaz had tried to dispose of in the lake were blackmail letters from Joel to patients at Hill Barnes. Noah had found the letters and pressured Michael to do something about it. Michael did not want this big family secret to be revealed, so he pushed Noah off, but failed to kill him. Willow and Lizzie realise Martha is also missing. In the end, Gabriel helps Willow and the police find Martha and Fliss. Martha is a fake name which Alice took to be able to create a new life after her time at Hill Barnes. She reunites with her sister Betty, who is Willow and Fliss’s mother.

Themes:

Hope

One thing that none of the characters lose throughout the book is hope. Most of the characters face difficult situations that they all have to overcome. Alice had to go through beatings from her father, her mother dying and getting the blame for it, and later being put in a home. When she was in the home, (Hill Barnes), she kept thinking “Soon Betty will come”, even after years of being apart she still had hope that she would reunite with her sister, which she did, in the end. All the characters searching for Fliss, such as Willow, Sunny, Adrika and Jensen, hardly slept or ate until they found Fliss. The police found multiple clues that made it quite clear that it was too late, but they never gave up, and towards the end of the book they did find her alive. One of the reasons why these characters never gave up was because of relationships with other people.

Relationships

Relationships play a big role in the book, especially family relationships. The book shows two pairs of twin sisters and represents how a sibling relationship often looks. The relationship between Willow and her sister represents this kind of relationship with sibling rivalry. The relationship between the second pair of sisters, Betty and Alice, is also significant. Throughout the abuse from their father, they always have each other to make it a lot more durable. While in Hill Barnes, the sisters are separated, but the consistent thought of someday being reunited kept Alice sane.

Identity and transformation

Most of the characters experience some form of grief during the book: Alice and Betty when they lose their mother and each other for a significantly long time and the whole Braxton family who lose their relative. Willow, her mother, Sunny, and others did not lose Fliss, but they had to get start getting used to the idea of not finding her, as the days went by. During this difficult time, they, especially Willow, go through some self discovery. Throughout almost the whole book, while searching for Fliss, Willow thinks of how self centred Fliss is, how she only wanted a man because Willow wanted him, which was one of the reasons for their big fight. But towards the end of the book, Willow contemplates whether it was the other way around. She was the selfish one, for even thinking that Fliss only wanted a man because “Willow wanted him first”. While Fliss was missing, Willow changes her whole way of thinking of her sister, which betters their relationship.

Genre and style

The genres of the book are murder mystery, fiction, crime and thriller. The writing style of The Fall is descriptive: Blok’s style of writing enriches all the desperate feelings of fear, anxiety, and frustration that the characters feel in the tricky positions they find themselves in. Throughout the book, readers often get to see a more personal perspective of the characters, reading about their thoughts and feelings: this way, we see a more detailed character development.

Development history

The Fall is part of a series which follows DCI Martin Jensen. However, the book works on its own as well. In the podcast “The Bestseller Experiment” (https://bestsellerexperiment.libsyn.com/ep381-rachael-blok-follow-your-character) Rachael Blok says that when she came up with the Dutch DCI Martin Jensen, that's when she felt as though she had a novel worth publishing. She mentions how she has multiple Dutch family members and has spent a lot of time in Holland, and took inspiration to create a character whom she could write numerous books around. Thanks to the fact that the same character reappears in different books, she could focus on different aspects of his life.

In the podcast, Blok says she draws inspiration for her crime novels from her childhood. When she was little, she loved Agatha Christie novels, an incredibly well known crime novel writer. Blok loves the process of working out clues, which she herself tries to have in all of her books. She grew up in a beautiful cathedral city, which also has its dark sides. A cathedral town, she points out, is a great place to hide bodies.

The beginning of a book is for Blok the most difficult part, she says, and she took inspiration from earlier books to write The Fall. In the same podcast, she says she usually knows who has done the crime before she starts writing, so she begins with writing the end; that way, she knows “where she is going”, which makes the writing process easier. Before writing her books, she sends a detailed plan, chapter by chapter, to her editor, but when she starts writing, she gets to know the characters and “suddenly they’re doing their own thing”, so she writes a seperate way than how she planned. “I'm constantly surprised how differently stories turn out on paper than in their original planning. Fiction has a life of its own.”

Publication history

First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd. Paperback first published in 2022 by Head of Ltd.

Literary significance and reception

The Fall has been praised by multiple reviewers for its memorable characters, for how it deals with the theme of people not conforming to what is “normal” being put into homes, and for its plot twist that makes readers reconsider how they think about the book. The novel has also received positive reviews about how Blok has written a fantastic backstory that ultimately impacts many of the characters.

External links https://bestsellerexperiment.libsyn.com/ep381-rachael-blok-follow-your-character

https://www.myweekly.co.uk/2022/04/19/the-fall-rachael-blok/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58368036-the-fall

https://emmasbibliotreasures.com/2022/04/19/blog-tour-the-fall-by-rachael-blok/

https://www.rachelreadit.co.uk/bookreview-the-fall-by-rachael-blok/

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