Skip to main content

Review 31: Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

Elizabeth Is Missing
Elizabeth Is Missing is basically Memento, if Guy Pearce were a confused old woman. I imagine many Guy Pearce films could be improved by this minor tweak. It has all the elements – mystery, memory blocks and crime. And also a surprisingly large number of references to toast.

The central premise is that the main character, Maud, is trying to track down her missing friend Elizabeth (the title of the book being somewhat on-the-nose) while she bashes up against against the seemingly-insurmountable obstacle of her own deteriorating memory.

But that doesn’t necessarily do justice to this. The way Maud’s memories dart in and out, surfacing some details and losing others, is an elegant patchwork, and gives the reader the gradual unravelling of the story even as Maud fails to hang onto it. And there’s a whole other story tied into this, as her efforts to discover her friend’s whereabouts increasingly mirror an unsolved mystery from much earlier in her life – the disappearance of Maud’s sister, Sukey.

All this is set against a very humane depiction of dementia. The exact strand she suffers from is never quite spelled out, but the symptoms are very similar to those of Alzheimer’s. We see the frustrations her family and community feel when dealing with her regularly repeating herself, or exhibiting strange behaviour – and that’s believable and sad – but we also see what Maud’s own experience is like, from a first-person perspective, which is relatively uncovered in literature. We see how people refuse to take her seriously, and treat her like a child, the more confused she gets. This isn’t black-and-white though – it’s also clear that the measures they take and the way they talk to her are developed with her best interests in mind. It’s a dynamic that thousands of people must enter into all the time, but which is very rarely written about from both angles.

One inevitable danger with this premise is that, as the reader, you also end up treading the same ground many times over, and this can get a little wearing. But there’s enough plot, humour and pace to help manage you through these parts. There’s also the deterioration of Maud’s mind over time, which splits the fragments apart into even smaller chunks and creates quite a vivid depiction of Maud’s crumbling mind. It feels like watching a house fall apart when you’re inside it.

This was another audiobook purchase for me, and I really recommend it. The narrator, Anna Bentinck, does a brilliant job, capturing both Old Maud and Young Maud fantastically. But I’m sure the good old paper-‘n’-ink one does a splendid job too.

--

This is my thirty-first book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 8: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen . The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around. Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page. It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to w...
Post a Comment
Read more