Chilling family tale

A remote country house falling into ruin; a son who has gone missing; a pretty little girl who won’t speak; a beautiful mother tumbling towards alcoholism; a creepy childminder with designs on the silent child – the ingredients that make up the bare plot of Absence are close to those of gothic horror.

I kept thinking of the dark fantasy films of the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (by coincidence, his forthcoming movie The Shape of Water also features an elective mute) or the Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar, who made the marvellous chiller The Others.

Indeed, the author of this book may have had such films in mind. The drunken mother here is a native Spanish speaker, perhaps by way of acknowledging these influences. Absence would certainly make a terrific, edge-ofyour-seat film.

Enjoyably spooky, then, but there’s more to Sarah Wiseman than things that go bump in the night. The writing, for one. Time and again, she comes up with original and arresting descriptions: a teenager’s bare midriff ‘showing like the section of a snake’; the mute child ‘as pale as a pear’; the sensation of blushing, which ‘wasn’t the sudden colouring that happens to women in novels. It was more like being swallowed whole by a whale, being right inside its hot, pink mouth.’ The absence the missing son creates fills the house like ‘leaking gas’; fear erupts in ‘little liquid spurts’; wallpaper curls off a wall ‘like a bunch of celery’.

There’s also a generosity, almost an extravagance, about this book. It’s as if the writer had a bulging suitcase crammed with ideas and characters which she emptied out and included here. The malevolent childminder alone would have made an excellent story – a sort of nanny version of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal – but she provides just one strand of the tale. The mystery of the missing son, likewise, would be fodder enough for a novel. Others have constructed whole books out of grand but neglected Irish houses but, here, such a place is only the backdrop.

The story is told from three points of view: Miss Blane, the childminder, is the first voice; then there’s Flora, the teenage sister of the missing boy; and, thirdly, Maisie, the mute little sister. It’s testament to the skill of the author that this does not feel like overcrowding. Each brings a different and valuable perspective to the story.

Miss Blane opens the book by flinging her soon-to-be dead mother’s wheelchair over a cliff; the pink, filmy dressing gown, clinging to a rock, is a ghastly image.

Miss Blane has been sorely bullied by her mother and brought up with no knowledge of her father’s identity, which makes her a very troubled and troubling figure. Miss Blane is, in fact, the most alarming domestic since Mrs Danvers in Rebecca. You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her, but it might be almost worse to be her favourite. A scene in which she goes in search of her missing father has a terrible, dark comedy. Part of the fun of Absence is in determining whether Miss Blane is a proper nutter or only a relatively harmless fantasist.

Flora’s sections come as a relief after the dread Miss Blane’s. Wiseman exactly captures the tone of a teenager’s voice, as well as some of the reckless impulsivity of her actions. When Flora goes off to search for her brother – first to Dublin, then to America – it seems hardly possible that she will escape unharmed. For her desperate family, left at home, things begin to unravel. Almost until the eleventh hour, it seems as if their sense of hopelessness and dread may cause them all to fall prey to Miss Blane’s twisted schemes.

With all these strengths, together with its flashes of black wit and its strong and well realised sense of place, Absence is a truly absorbing novel. I had never heard of Sarah Wiseman until I read this book. She deserves to be much better known.