Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

Viking | 2020 (9 January) | 320p | Review copy | Buy the book

One winter’s day, in the middle of a snowstorm, the unthinkable happens. A school, surrounded by trees, on the rural edge of a village on the Somerset coast, is under siege. The headmaster, Matthew Marr, has been shot in his office. Brave sixth formers drag him into the library, which they barricade with books to prevent the gunman from entering. Now and again, they can hear him trying the door, biding his time, waiting for something. The other school children, some so young and tiny, are scattered around the school, with most in the theatre and many more, the youngest, in the pottery workshop deep in the woods. But not all of the children are accounted for. With no idea how many gunmen there are, with some children missing, with frantic parents desperate for news, DI Rose Polstein must deal with a situation that, as it develops live on the media, shocks the nation and beyond.

Three Hours is an extraordinarily powerful, harrowing novel. It does indeed take place over three hours and it’s that minute by minute coverage, as we move between perspectives, that makes this a tour de force read that is next to impossible to put down. This is immediate, tense writing, that still manages to fit in beautiful character portrayals, bring these people alive for us, whether they are school children, teachers, the headmaster, parents or the police. There is so much going on. There’s barely time to draw breath and so we hold it in as the drama plays out before us.

I don’t want to say much more about what happens over these three hours because this is a novel packed full of revelations and shocks. We are intensely involved with some of these characters, especially with two Syrian refugee brothers, but the stories of the children in the library and in the pottery workshop are for me the most powerful. Some moments are agonisingly tense and worrying. There is an additional fascinating edge to the drama literally played out in the theatre, as the children continue to rehearse their school production of Macbeth.

Some big themes are introduced in the novel, about the state of our world as well as about the stress of being a child in that world. Macbeth is used to bring out some of those themes, making it possible for some of the children to express themselves about what they are facing. This is so cleverly done.

Rosamund Lipton is an incredible writer. She makes us empathise with people so well, especially with children, as we saw in her last novel, The Quality of Silence, which was another excellent novel. Three Hours, though, is an absolute triumph. I cried more than once and there are moments that will be very hard to forget. Above all else, this is a novel about hate but also, more importantly, about how love can defeat that hate. It’s a fine message and this superb novel does it full justice.

Other review
The Quality of Silence