AND FINALLY
Novels that were balm after loss
YOU won’t be surprised to know that my avid reading of fiction and poetry informs everything I write. Having to bid farewell to both my parents in the past 18 months has focussed my mind on loss, leaving me bewildered by the simple, ancient question, ‘Where are the dead?’
A scarf, an old note in a familiar hand, a tattered photograph falling from a book . . . such things remind you that being ‘haunted’ isn’t necessarily about ghosts. The invisible presence of our beloved dead can feel the most natural thing in the world.
That’s why two novels published this summer have been helpful. The first is Think Of Me by Frances Liardet — a beautifully written, poignant story set before and after World War II. James is a widower in mourning for his late wife Yvette, as well for as their baby daughter.
Yvette’s complicated spirit is a presence in the narrative — a woman whose secret story, revealed through her notebooks, becomes heartbreakingly unsettling. James is haunted by his lost love, but learns to accept that she was not necessarily the person he knew. And yet she was . . .
A more literal haunting happens in Louisa Young’s sweetly comic yet deeply moving Twelve Months And A Day. Anybody who loves the film Ghost will feel the same way about this wonderful novel, which asks what happens when people cease to live — but love does not.
A man and a woman — strangers at first — are devastated when their beloved partners die. In time they meet and become friends, but will affection evolve into something deeper? All the while their dead loves, so real to us, are
watching on together . . . until . . . but I won’t give that away.
The novel allows us to think of those we have lost as actually there. And yet there is comfort within possibility: ‘It wasn’t that grief wasn’t there. It’s just that space had been made for happiness.’ Both these novels leave you feeling hopeful; thus the best fiction can make you sad — then release you, in the end.
Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, london W8 5TT, or email bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.