Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

[Anja]

This well-written story combines an old mystery with a new one in the harrowed mind of the likeable but tiresome protagonist who suffers from dementia. Maud’s murky mind is the perfect setting for a story intended to leave you with a bit of a chill, as she continually forgets where she is and how she got there.

An otherwise normal granny living in normal modern London with normal and mundane problems, Maud is expected to stay indoors and out of the way, not to cause trouble, not to buy or eat anything before asking and most importantly not to speak about things which irritate busy, sane people. The author opens up the world through Maud’s eyes and makes the reader cringe on her behalf and hate the insensitivity of others toward her.

As Maud desperately clings to her search for her missing friend Elizabeth, who no-one else seems to care about, she keeps returning to vivid memories of the disappearance of her older sister Sukey years ago, when Maud was but a budding adolescent in the jumbled aftermath of WWII. The plot unfolds with the introduction of the quirkiest of characters: the dangerous mad woman Maud feared as a child, Elizabeth’s brute of a neglecting son, Sukey’s helpful but questionable husband, the aloof and mysterious boarder in her childhood home...

It is easy enough to guess that Maud might know more than she has allowed herself to remember and it soon enough becomes apparent that one of the mysteries carries far greater importance than the other. Just before you cleverly fear you have predicted the rest, the ending delightfully intertwines the two realities in an unexpected way, leaving the reader with just enough open-endedness to ponder for a few days after finishing the novel.

My only critique is that the story is a little one-dimensional in that it repeats and repeats and repeats the same line of thought. Intentionally I am sure, but this nevertheless becomes a frustration. Despite it being a short read I couldn’t help feeling that the story could have been conveyed in half the content and that perhaps it was a missed opportunity to dig a little deeper into the human psyche.