Sophie Ratcliffe was 13 when her father died. Over the course of this demi-memoir we gradually learn the reasons why, which turn out to be both shocking and mundane. A marble-blue complexion, a sketchy knowledge of the harmful effects of UV rays (it’s the 1980s) and some unlucky genes meant that the mild-mannered north London civil servant was killed by skin cancer at the age of just 45.
Ratcliffe’s description of loss, which she lugs through the next 30 years, is wonderfully done. She describes her particular version as having grey pilled fur and webbed feet. Her loss is clammy and smelly and turns up to spoil everything that is supposed to be good – Christmas, sex, conversations with new friends (her loss has a weakness for alcohol and a tendency to overshare). Certainly it was running alongside Ratcliffe as she powered through her successful, post-Dad adolescence: shiny exam results, grade six flute, Saturday mornings mooching around The Body Shop. But in the early evenings, after homework is done and before it is dark enough for anyone to notice, the teenager and her loss slip out of the house, now packed to the gills with foreign language student lodgers, and go looking for crepuscular sex. There are men in caravans, men on trains, men in Highgate cemetery. Back then, it was what people called “going off the rails”.
The train image is apt, because Ratcliffe’s organising metaphor in this beautifully disorganised book is the lost property office of a big central station – the place you go to search for earphones, a book, or some earlier version of yourself that you misplaced along the way. Doing this requires you to pass through the same station at least twice and maybe even multiple times, which is why train travel in Ratcliffe’s telling is not an accelerating flight to a particular destiny, but a slow and endless loop of accreting details.
She starts small, with her suburban north London commute to school in the early 80s. This involves a complicated shunt up and down the bifurcated Northern Line chaperoned by her father, who has been quietly dying for the last 10 years. At this point, though, he looks like any other dad strap-hanging on his way to a job he hates; dressed in navy mac and pinstripe suit, he appears so generic that on one occasion little Sophie mistakes someone else’s knees for his. Mostly, though, she spends the tube journey on imaginary branch lines. Her favourite reading matter is Enid Blyton’s The Wishing-Chair stories, about a sturdy piece of household furniture that doubles as a flying magic carpet for its suburban child owners. Sophie longs to take sewing scissors to the wishing chair, scratching and ripping its seat and kicking its silly legs with their prissy little wings: for if she hasn’t been granted an emergency exit from a life that is hurtling the wrong way, then why should the insufferably smug Peter and Mollie?
Alongside her own rail journeys, Ratcliffe lays out those of other train-travelling women. Her two principal alter egos are Anna Karenina and Kate Field. The first is a made-up person so compelling that she has long escaped the confines of Tolstoy’s novel to become extra-textual, a cipher of loss and longing and catastrophic train travel (Anna famously ends her life by jumping in front of the train as it rushes through Obiralovka).
And then there is Kate Field, a real but mostly unknown woman who pops up in different guises in the novels of Anthony Trollope. The British author was fascinated, even a little infatuated, with Field, a journalist and lecturer who embodied all the pep and energy of an emancipated Yankee woman. In a deft series of interchanges and parallel tracks, Ratcliffe produces a persuasive argument that the “English novel” that Anna reads on one of her most important train journeys is in fact by Trollope, more likely than not featuring a disguised Field as its heroine.
This is tricksy stuff – one thinks a bit of Tom McCarthy – but what stops Ratcliffe’s book buckling under its look-at-me-cleverness is its patent, aching sincerity. Many of the journeys she describes are occasions to unspool her present-day experience as a middle-aged academic who is also parent to two small children – a flailing juggle of fishfingers, nits and classic literature. There is total candour, too, about the dullness of married life, perhaps the kind of thing that pushed Anna away from her husband in the first place (Ratcliffe is convinced that Alexei Karenin always folded his socks neatly before sex) and propelled Field to announce that she could imagine nothing worse than being a wife.
There is a trend at the moment for books in which swotty women consult classic literature to help them through the growing pains of middle age. Helen Macdonald is the obvious example here, with her bereavement, her return to her childhood passion for the writing of TH White and, of course, her hawk. Others have turned to Anne Brontë to palliate spinsterhood, to George Eliot to negotiate stepmotherhood, while one writer has used Elizabeth Gaskell to self-medicate a romantic heartbreak. In this book Ratcliffe, an Oxford English don, tries to do even more, straining – and it does feel strained in places – to produce a text so capacious that all the lost things of her life, of all our lives, can finally find their proper place.
• The Lost Properties of Love by Sophie Ratcliffe is published by William Collins (RRP £16.99). To order a copy for £14.95 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
