Missing the mark
This novel is packed with great characters and a strong sense of place but the central mystery runs out of steam
Adam Thorpe is a wonderfully sympathetic novelist with a keen eye and alert ear. He creates credible characters, individuals and not, for the most part, types. There’s a fine range of them in this new novel, set mostly in Lincoln.
He evokes a sense of place with uncanny accuracy and is excellent on weather. His dialogue almost always rings true. He composes a social picture with fine discrimination. But the jealous gods of fiction rarely give a novelist all the talents; they have denied Thorpe the gift of storytelling. This novel promises a gripping story, but the narrative line is blurred and what is promised is not delivered.
It begins excellently. A young couple David, a New Zealander, and his Australian wife Lisa, both eco-enthusiasts, are visiting the Lincolnshire coast with their children. Their marriage is fraying. They have come to irritate each other. There is comedy here – can they permit the kids a can of Cocacola and is the ice-cream free of commercial impurities? Then David’s eye is caught by a poster some months old. It features a missing 14-year-old called Fay, who disappeared with her dog. Her appearance is striking, her red hair surely memorable. David makes copies of the poster to display on their camper-van. The novel, one assumes, will have David seeking Fay, perhaps in the face of Lisa’s disapproval.
This expectation is disappointed. David and Lisa disappear from the novel. Apart from arousing our interest in Fay, this first section is irrelevant. It might be, indeed is, a good short story, but it is scarcely connected to what follows. We then get a snatch of Fay’s life before her disappearance, a snapshot of home: her depressed and incapable mother, her dodgy but amiable stepfather, Ken, a failed rock musician, now busking. Fay is well established as tough, likeable, if foul-mouthed, responsible, devoted to the dog. One is interested. There are four chapters, scattered through the novel, seen from Fay’s point-of view. They are all very good.
The novel then switches to a number of different characters, most of them shopkeepers in a lane. There is Sheena, a blowsy but still attractive women who manages a shop selling expensive children’s clothes; she befriends Fay who works for her on Saturdays and has an affair with an odd, even sinister, but to her beautiful young man called Gavin. Sheena however hankers after Paul, who owns a shoe shop but goes bare-footed himself, and has a cold relationship with the weirdo Mike, the proprietor of a second-hand bookshop. It becomes chillier still when Fay pockets one of his books. There are other characters, Cosmina, a beautiful young Romanian who
works as a carer in an old folks home where Mike’s mother is dying, and Howard, a retired steel worker whose wife is in a coma in the same home. They are all thoroughly imagined, though there is too much of the tedious Mike, and there are some excellent scenes, one in particular when Howard visits a park where he used to take his daughter when she was a child, and where he too sees a poster of the missing Fay. Finally there is Chris, who used to make films and is now a trainee monk in a monastery.
The novel is never less than interesting, partly because the atmosphere of the town, both material and moral, is so well evoked, partly because of Thorpe’s sense of the strangeness of other people’s lives. You cannot but admire and enjoy his ability to portray such a variety of people and to explore the randomness of barely-connected experiences. It’s a novel that demands, and deserves, to be read slowly, with close attention. And yet ultimately it promises more than it delivers. This is partly because the straggling narrative stutters to a halt, partly because interesting characters – Cosmina and Howard , for instance, more or less drop out, when one would like to know more of their story. This is of course something true to life, but it is disappointing in a novel. Most of all, one wants to know more about Fay, especially to have the mystery of her disappearance resolved. So we have a novel brilliant and moving in parts, unsatisfactory as a whole.
The novel promises a gripping story.. but what is promised is not delivered