English author S.J. Watson’s thriller novel Second Life (2015) concerns Julia a young woman living out an unconvincingly idyllic life with her husband, Hugh, and an adopted son. Julia’s life changes dramatically when her sister, Kate, is killed in a seemingly random act of terror in Paris. The investigation stumps the police since Kate had no known enemies or history of conflict, and the attack did not seem politically motivated. Taking the investigation into her own hands, Julia finds that her sister was using a number of websites to indulge in sexual fantasies with strangers around Europe. Julia joins the sites, subjecting herself to a strange sexual underworld to uncover a series of clues leading toward the identity of Kate’s murderer. The novel combines themes of sexual life, dual identities, and the digitization of imagery and communication, which compel some people to take their sexual adventures to dangerous and unprecedented lengths. The novel begins in the immediate aftermath of the news of Kate Plummer’s death. Julia experiences a flood of relief, then shame at the fact that she is rejoicing in the death of someone she loved, having spent most of her life in constant anxiety about the safety of her happy-go-lucky sister. She had also been sparring with Kate over the custody of her adopted son, Connor, who is Kate’s biological child, having been taken in when Kate was a teenage mother who had no resources for caring for a baby. Having promised to always protect her, she now feels like a fraud of a sister. Julia soon becomes frustrated with the police’s lack of concern for finding the identity of her sister’s murderer, having concluded that it was an isolated event. Julia becomes entangled, just like before, in her sister’s narrative, but this time with grief and confusion mixed in. Meanwhile, she experiences friction with her husband, Hugh, a rational surgeon who believes that it is overkill to fixate on the cause of death rather than go through a finite period of mourning. Deciding to look into Kate’s computer, Julia comes upon Kate’s messages connected to users of various sex websites with whom she used to hook up abroad. Julia attempts to reconstruct Kate’s past by meeting her past lovers to find out if they might know anything about her disappearance. As she does so, she reveals snippets of her own wild past as well. In her early adulthood, she hung out with a clique of partiers in Berlin, suffering from an undiagnosed case of depression and alcoholism. She managed her addictive personality by marrying Hugh, a respectable man a decade older than her. Julia’s similarity to Kate enables her to cope with the revelations about Kate’s sexual behavior and encourages her to keep searching for more answers. Eventually, Julia finds out that Kate had been in contact with a man who catfished her, presenting as an imaginative and kinky but otherwise high functioning and gentlemanly person. Underneath, his fantasies were much darker, and her increasing wariness of him led to her flight from him in Paris. Though Julia is competent about her narrative, she is unable to find sufficient evidence or locate him in the end. The book’s ambiguous conclusion reflects a sentiment that solving crime in the digital age is complicated by the futility of making sense of the human impulses we imprint onto our digital lives, or tracing our digital identities in the real world. Second Life acknowledges, but is ambivalent about, this social shift, comprising a warning to the possibilities of the new social universes that the Internet opens up.

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S. J. Watson

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Second Life

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