With a passing nod to Brief Encounter, The Vanishing Hours brings together an unlikely pair of strangers, each of whom has deep-seated injuries to heal. The first is a woman so damaged in childhood by the sudden disappearance of her father that she has barely dared to live out loud since the day he walked out of her life. Instead, she dedicates herself to the construction of “an encyclopaedia of every word I’ve ever fallen in love with”; an inventory of memories and objects so carefully cross-referenced that it becomes a Proustian enterprise – one whose links all lead back to the lost father, just as everything in A la recherche du temps perdu recalls Marcel’s beautiful but elusive mother. The inventory becomes all-encompassing, a substitute for life, an attempt to cheat time. “If I could remember the way it all happened,” she writes, “perhaps there would be a part of me that never changed, never fell away from him, like the cliffs that crumble into the sea.”
Naturally, this resolve leads to isolation and psychic inertia – until one evening, on an impulse visit to a hotel bar, a stone’s throw from the clinic where she is receiving a mysterious “treatment”, the woman is reluctantly drawn into conversation with a nameless man who, in almost every way, is her exact opposite. Where she has been frozen by grief, he has given himself over to a frenetic quest for lost love; like the Flying Dutchman, he travels far and wide, living through so much that, in the end, he can “hardly engage with anything”.
The woman is initially unwilling to engage with this unknown other, and suspects his account is, if not a total fabrication, then something he is in the process of “creating” as he goes along. Yet their encounter allows her, as one of the final encyclopedia entries puts it, “to save or rescue something. To grow back a skin that can shelter nerve endings. To be able to feel again without the feeling burning. To bloom again, to sprout new life, put roots down. To have gone through hell.” In short, to recover. How this recovery begins – and we see only the first signals of new life – makes The Vanishing Hours a moving and unconventionally wise account of loss and memory and of how redemption works, even for those who resist it most.
• The Vanishing Hours by Barney Norris is published by Doubleday (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
