I know I seem almost exclusively sci-fi and series in my
reading now, but I made a bet with myself to not read any more sci-fi for the
next 3 months (except Dr Who, for the
marathon, obviously!), and to get back to reading other kinds of lit. My first read was this wonderful book, so
wonderful that I have had to give it its own review.
Elizabeth Is Missing
SHOULD have been highly depressing,
featuring a protagonist who is slowly forgetting everything, with
dementia. I find dementia terrifying (as
a possibility for myself and my family, having watched it happen to a
grandparent), and highly distressing.
But the book didn’t work out that way at all. The heroine is
the one of the most compromised and unreliable narrators I’ve ever read, yet I
felt nothing but sympathy and identification with her throughout. All the weird
things she says, that you can see to the other characters seem to be coming
from nowhere, indicating she is just utterly lost, are shown to be the product
of what remains of semi-lucid memory and thought processes. In her mind, Maud is trying to solve what she
sees as the terrifying and perplexing disappearance of her only remaining friend
and confidante, Elizabeth. All the way
through the book, she searches, going to the same places over and over, losing
her thread, going back, doing it again; sometimes holding on to a vague idea of
what she was doing, sometimes not.
Interspersed with this are her long ago memories of the
immediately post war period, where she was a just about teen, living with her
parents and her sister, Sukey. Sukey too
vanishes. And the novel revolves around byplay
between Maud’s twisted and desperate perceptions of the present, and her clear
and revealing memories of the past and what happened to Sukey. I’m not spoilering you (as it is obvious), to
say that by the close of the book, Maud has released enough information and in
enough of an understandable way that the crime of what happened to Sukey is
resolved, with the help of her exasperated and at the end of her tether
daughter. As for Elizabeth…? I won’t spoiler that one.
I can’t emphasize enough how unputdownable this book
is. I have no idea if the depiction of
the slowly unravelling and black holed mind of the dementia-ed protagonist is
accurate or not (how can we entirely tell?), but it feels very plausible. I cannot understand how reading the book didn’t
terrify me to my core, as what is happening to Maud’s mind is dreadful. But it didn’t. I felt strong fellow feeling and
identification with her, and I was desperate with her, for her to find
Elizabeth, or even get downstairs safely. There are several times when she wanders off
out to do things (as dementia patients do), and I seriously worried if she
would get home safely, or if anything befell her, how on earth she’d get out of
it, as she wouldn’t be able to remember from one moment to the next how on
earth she got there, or what was happening.
I suppose there may be comparisons here with the slick Memento, or even the far more relevant
(and harrowing) Still Alice by Lisa Genova – but this
book was something all of its own. The closest I can give you for feel, is the Alzheimer's sufferer in Ruth Rendell's Thirteen Steps Down, who keeps putting the wrong things in washing machines and all over the house, which makes perfect sense when read from her point of view; and none when others view her. This book has two huge strengths. It's an almost perfect minute portrait of everyday details in two
completely different English eras. Now: where care in the community and lack of
funding make holding on to people who wander physically and mentally
increasingly difficult; and the
immediately post-World War 2 period, where people did vanish and walk away from
their lives all the time, as history makes clear…But also: it feels so much more rooted
and real, in terms of identity, than many books I have read about characters
with crystal clear yet flawed human thinking, in any time period.
It’s an amazing feat to be able to give a
character a clear and rounded identity of many facets in two stages of their
lives, and have them not contradict either within in each period (e.g. the confusion
of teen years: when Maud dresses as her lost sister, and is unsure what to make
of her meetings with her sister’s husband, Frank, her possible attraction to
him despite her suspicion and distrust of him), or between each period: the way Maud as a confused old person forgets
from one moment to the next who her daughter is, near the end, and tries not to
look at the bruises or pinch marks on her daughter’s body that she suspects in
the back of her remaining mind, that she put there – indeed, the dealing with
her very real violence and frustration is incredibly well done.
There’s a brilliant way too of showing the internal reality
of Maud for Maud, and then how she is
perceived and treated by others on the outside. The attitude of the policeman to whom she
reports the missing Elizabeth 5 times; he seems so real and understandable,
patronising and wryly humourous. The
only person, in fact, who treats Maud with any dignity is the woman in the
local newspaper office, when she gets as far as attempting (and managing) to
put an ad in the paper for help for finding her. I felt entirely for the frustration of her
tired daughter, dealing with the dropped and soiled clothes, the missed
appointments, the terror of picking up your mother from the police station at 2
a.m. because she wandered again, the dealing with the repetitive phrases Maud
keeps coming out with that seem to make no sense: “Where would you grow marrows?” The mounting frustration and despair of her
daughter is so clear and well done. And
again, since I’m equally identifying with that (having been a carer myself once
and which I found horribly painful), I’m very surprised that I didn’t just fall
into an over emotional pit and put the book down. But it wasn’t written in such a way as to
belabour the clearly emotional matter of its characters, at all. Its possible to find much humour here, but you are always just smiling along, never laughing cruelly at anyone. The misunderstandings between characters of sound mind, let alone the mentally suffering ones are just so real and common.
Actually, the comparisons I’d make, were I going to, are to Taichi Yamada,
Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Especially Ishiguru’s The Unconsoled – a terribly difficult, brilliant and winding, ever winding book of story
after story after story, each threading to the next and you keep waiting for a
story or a line of character to become clear and it never does. By the end, you’ve experienced something so
close to actual real life, in that none of made sense and linked up properly at
all, though it seemed to tangentially
(and then thoroughly explains why we are so superstitious and make patterns
from the oddest of things, because it’s so vital to us to feel that things do
make some sort of sense), that you feel irritated at the lack of closure, yet
in awe of the scope of the book. I would
say Elizabeth Is Missing manages both
much more and still less closure, but makes sense more as it goes along, for
all that the main character is almost totally lost and moreso, by the
ending. The reason for the inclusion of (the deeply underappreciated) Taichi Yamada here, is the perplexedness of his main protagonists, and the way I always fall for them utterly, identifying and rooting for them within a world that makes increasingly little sense. (Why are not MORE of this man's excellent, haunting and spooky books in translation over here??? WHY?!) In terms of Murakami, this is a
novel of the every day and its details and the thoughts you think while living
it; the strange things that pop out at you and the things that appear where
they shouldn’t be, and turn out to be portentous or not. It makes a drama of the nothing of our everyday
lives. Not melodrama, but drama. There's a quote on the back from Jonathan Coe, saying the book is one of "those mythical beasts, the book you cannot put down", which indeed I did find it to be. (If you want another, read Coe's own magnificently funny and terrifying book about a narcolepsy sufferer, House of Sleep. That too is a masterpeice.)
I cannot recommend Elizabeth Is Missing highly enough. I do not get how the author managed to not
bore me when for the millionth time her character had no idea how she got
somewhere, or lost something, or is looking at all her little remembering notes
that don’t make sense as she’s forgotten what they are for…I do not get how
that did not make me scream with frustration.
(Such excellent writing, when you cannot see how it was done!) But it did not. I was just driven and so determined for valiant Maud,
that she would resolve something. That I felt it understandable when she picked
up bits of rubbish from the street and tried to eat them; or when she tore the
heads off flowers she used to love as a girl.
The gift of making sense of actions that appear inexplicable is a mastery
of such empathy and fellow feeling that this book could almost be a gift to our
modern age of selfishness and uncaring. The
increasing multitudes that fill the ranks of ‘them’ and not ‘us’, whoever the
hell WE are, each one of us. The way we
are all subjected to little endless media tales of the scary hoardes of ‘others’,
that come to take our things, our benefits, our houses, our lives. The way those tales worm inside and make us
afraid and defensive and not wanting to understand any ‘others’ anymore.
Next time I see a crazy old woman in the street, I won’t
just cross over or feel afraid and disgusted that that is some sort of future
mirror of myself, that I might catch this madness…I might just try to
understand a bit more.
This book, with no apparent effort, is just leaking humanity
and empathy. No emotional wrecking ball, just a bloody good story and an
amazing set of supporting characters to go with the towering figure of little
bent over Maud and her personal mystery.
It’s one of those books that does our world in small, but leaves you
with a bigger picture. No idea how she
did it, Emma Healey is something of a genius.
Please go and read it. Really marvellous. And amazingly enjoyable.
