Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey.

.                                Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey.

"I've missed this tiny thing for nearly seventy years. And now the earth, made sludgy and chewable with the melting snow, has spat out a relic. Spat it into my hands. But where from?"

It seems that Healey's paternal grandmother who had been showing signs of senility came out with the simple but inspiring phrase that prompted this debut novel: "My friend is missing." The critics loved it. I loved it. Healey didn't want it to be too bleak portraying a vulnerable octogenarian showing signs of dementia, trapped in a life of boredom and tedium: watching or attempting to watch  tv, attempting to read when the words don't make sense, waiting endlessly for the carer or the daughter. What a life! Nine publishers fought over its publication and the tv rights have already been sold. Suggestions regarding Judy Dench or Maggie Smith playing Maud are strong possibilities. Watch this space!

Maud is 82, eccentric with an obsession for collecting anything and everything. She has done this since being a child but when it continues into old age it is infuriating for her daughter Helen. Most of it is rubbish after all. "Sufferers often seek refuge in a childhood version of themselves." (Healey) Dementia transforms a previously safe and recognisable world into one that is frightening and strange and the author captures this remarkably well. So it is appropriate to run two timelines, one that takes us back to post-war (1946) when Maud was a 15 year old and then move to present date. The plot flits backwards and forwards and significantly the author uses various means to connect both timelines, a character or a memory of an event. Very clever.

The potential bleakness is understanding the degeneration of Maud's mind, her inability to sometimes recognise her daughter or her granddaughter, Katy. Imagine losing your way going to the corner shop, with pockets full of lists, her “paper memory,” many meaningless and taking home umpteen tins of peaches, the same every day. Or what about twelve calls to the doctor telling him you are ill in a short space of time then when he arrives telling him you are fighting fit? Also imagine that your one and only friend Elizabeth just disappears and in her muddled mind, Maud suspects that Peter, Elizabeth's son must be responsible for getting rid of her. She never trusted him, she thought he was deliberately starving his mother.

 Maud makes several unsuccessful attempts to visit her home, reports the disappearance to the police on four separate occasions to their amusement and her agitation then puts an ad in the local Echo. Phoning Peter during the night and forgetting why she was phoning him caused him to swear and complain. Poor Helen was always having to apologise. Carla, one of the carers didn't help either. She relishes feeding Maud with the latest gossip particularly the gory bits which results in a distortion of Elizabeth's disappearance: "Elizabeth locked in room-crack addicts in house. Bound and tortured in basement." Ironically, Maud knows that her friend doesn't have a basement so something isn't quite right. So much for her paper memory.

The whodunnit part of the story is the major one to follow and it will keep you riveted. It is woven into the Elizabeth is missing plot meticulously and concerns half-forgotten memories which hold the key to a dark secret from the distant past, an unsolved mystery. “I found it too late, far too late. Now I’ll never find her. She’ll always be missing and I’ll always be looking for her. I can’t bear it.” It is the discovery of the remains of a compact belonging to her sister and found in the garden of her octogenarian friend Elizabeth.

"The mildewed mirror is like a window on a faded world, like a porthole looking out under the ocean. It makes {Maud} squirm with memories."

Sukey was Maud’s sister, seven years her senior and sophisticated. She loved dressing up and going dancing. Maud idolised her and they had a close relationship. Sukey married Frank who was a dodgy character and Maud’s lodger, Douglas disliked him intensely. He saw Frank as being a jealous man with a foul temper. Douglas had a soft spot for Sukey and he was always at Sukey’s house particularly when Frank was away working. Maud suspected they were having an affair which he denied.

An agitated Sukey came to visit Maud and family for tea as was the weekly custom and she wanted to sleep there rather than return home.  She then abruptly decided to return home and disappeared into thin air. This was 1946. Naturally her family was distraught and Pa blamed Frank. He thought she had been kidnapped or killed although he searched the town for her and even travelled to London scouring the streets in vain. The police had to deal with lots of cases of men and women disappearing so Sukey's disappearance became unremarkable: "People are being reported missing left, right and centre. The men can't get used to being back on Civvy Street, or the women can't get used to having their husbands home again, and so they're off."

A suitcase full of her clothes turns up but no Sukey. Two further devices are used to create mystery. One is the mad woman with a dark but tragic past who seems to stalk Sukey and Maud in a menacing way. On the night of Sukey's disappearance the mad woman scared the living daylights out of her and neighbours heard her screaming. Maud is petrified when she chases after her on many occasions. She has been known to grab Maud and hit her with an umbrella. What does she know about Sukey's disappearance? What is significant about her digging up of marrows? Is there a connection? If so, what is it?

The second device is the narrative thread concerned with the Grosvenor Hotel murderer, Kenneth Lloyd Holmes due to hang for the murder of two women. In Maud's demented mind perhaps Sukey was his third victim? "I had to know if he killed my sister." So she writes to him before his execution. Maud's mother and father died not knowing what happened to their daughter. "I don't want to die like that," admitted Maud. By the end of the novel past and present become fused with memories muddled. Earlier lucid thoughts change shape, lost in her state of dementia with this unsolved mystery. Well-written but unsettling.  

                              

Publisher: Puffin.    ISBN:  978-0-241-96818-5

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

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