The Last Thing To Burn by Will Dean

 

Thanh Dao is a Vietnamese woman living in an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It's a bleak, flat landscape of fenland and salt marshes. She lives with Len and he’s given her the name Jane. She may not use her actual name, and she’s not allowed to speak Vietnamese. In fact, we soon learn that there’s nothing normal about this relationship at all. 

Thanh Dao/Jane is an illegal immigrant, smuggled into the Britain in the back of a trailer. People came to her village and promised her and her sister the world - good jobs and money to send back to their family. In reality, they found themselves in bonded servitude, first on a large farm with other migrants and then separated, Jane sold to Len as a forced wife, her sister, to work in a nail bar.

Very quickly we suspect things are worse still.  Len forces Thanh Dao/Jane to live like his mother, using her old things rather than purchase anything new.  Len locks the phone away at all times, and the television. When she “misbehaves” Len burns her few remaining possessions until she has literally nothing left of her own. And what happened to Len’s first wife?

This is a harrowing novel that builds with creeping horror. It’s a slow-burning story, there is no action or particularly violent scenes, instead there is woman broken by slavery and brutality and her efforts to keep her identity and her sanity. It’s also all too horrifically likely, and that marks the pages with added dread. At the time of reading, a trial was ongoing for the men who smuggled 39 Vietnamese migrants into the UK, all of whom suffocated in the back of the lorry trailer. It was a horrific incident and one which brought to the fore the people trafficking route from Vietnam into Britain.  Modern slavery is a real blight, and countless illegal immigrants disappear all the time. Many will be in the black economy and not slaves (though they are still at risk of abuse), but others will be preyed upon and forced into slavery, and some perhaps will even suffer to the horrific extent Thanh Dao/Jane is.

The Last Thing To Burn is a brilliantly plotted and written novel. I read this novel is two sittings. It’s compelling and horrific. It’s a difficult reading, concerned as it is with a woman’s domestic torture. But it’s an important novel and one that will stay with me for a long time.

5 out of 5 stars