Detecting with dementia in Elizabeth is Missing

Emma Healey's debut novel is a tender but not sentimental book says Rosamund Urwin, with a heroine with memory loss who's hard to forget
Old head: Emma Healey
Rosamund Urwin5 June 2014

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking, £12.99)

Elizabeth is Missing has been dubbed “Gone Gran”. Like Gillian Flynn’s bestseller Gone Girl, Emma Healey’s debut novel has the mysterious disappearance of a woman at its heart. Its publisher, Viking, will also be hoping it replicates Gone Girl’s success: the company fought off eight rivals for the book and paid a six-figure sum.

The protagonist and narrator is Maud, an 82-year-old suffering from dementia. She buys tin after tin of sliced peaches. She has to rely on Post-its placed around her home to know what not to do. And she once even mistakes her own daughter for a stranger. So Maud isn’t a reliable narrator: there are gaps in her story, she forgets the names of objects and misunderstands what is happening around her.

For much of the novel Maud is fretting about the disappearance of her friend Elizabeth. She becomes a geriatric Nancy Drew, trying to solve the puzzle — turning up at Elizabeth’s house, asking the police for help and putting an ad in the local paper — but without being able to recall any of her investigation.

But what Maud can remember is a similar nightmare from her youth, when her sister, Sukey, went missing — and so the story flits between the present day and the post-war 1940s.

Sukey had married a heavy-drinking removals man, Frank, whom her family fears may be responsible for her vanishing. You soon realise the two disappearances are somehow linked.

Healey weaves her two mysteries together skilfully, and the twin timeline adds to the feeling of suspense. This is still a novel that benefits from re-reading, though: you don’t necessarily recognise the significance of certain details until the final pages. And the ending itself is a little anti-climatic: one half of the story is left too open, the other is wrapped up too neatly.

But Healey’s talent is evident in her portrayal of dementia. In last weekend’s Sunday Times the author said she had been inspired by watching her grandmother struggle with the condition, and it is cleverly conveyed, with the reader sharing in Maud’s confusion. Some of her experiences amuse but many upset — there’s a heartbreaking scene when she arrives at the charity shop where she used to volunteer, only to be told she no longer works there.

Healey is also compelling on the isolation and boredom of old age. All Maud’s friends bar Elizabeth are “in homes or in graves” and she spends her days waiting: for her carer or her daughter. But there’s also a loneliness that stems from her treatment by others: she’s patronised by the man in the corner shop, by the policeman she reports Elizabeth’s disappearance to, and even by her daughter: “I’m tired of the sympathetic smiles and the little pats people give you when you get things confused.”

Elizabeth is Missing is a tender but not sentimental book — charming but never cloying. And in Maud, Healey has found a fascinating voice: a heroine suffering from memory loss who is herself hard to forget.

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