There were several striking absences in Emma Healey’s debut novel, Elizabeth Is Missing, from an elderly woman suffering with memory loss through dementia, to the disappearance of her sister decades earlier and the eponymous Elizabeth.
That book received an avalanche of praise and bestseller stardom. This second novel, Whistle in the Dark, toys with the same subjects of disappearance and blots on the memory, except that the narrative intrigue is built around what happens when the disappeared return and what, if anything, can be retrieved of their lost time.
In this case, the missing person is a depressed and self-harming 15-year-old, Lana, who disappears while at an art workshop in the Peak District with her mother, Jen. She reappears after four days, bleeding and injured but alive. She is questioned by her parents and the police as to her whereabouts, but her answer remains stubbornly the same: she got lost and can’t remember. So begins, in part, the story of a mother desperate to discover what damage lies beneath Lana’s blanket of amnesia. She suspects sexual assault and sees the lurking presence of predatory men everywhere in her investigations.
But just as Healey’s last novel was not a crime story, nor a comedy but a blend of both, this too is written between genres. The crime detection is mixed in with the social satire of modern family life and middle-class motherhood. Jen is satirised as the over-anxious mother, accompanying Lana to therapy, listening in on her phone conversations, stalking her social media accounts, worrying that she is stuttering, has become part of a gang or, in one comic scene, that she is blinking too much.
It is a courageous attempt at generic hybridity on Healey’s part and the two elements of the book are, by turns, intriguing and entertaining. But blended together the effect is odd and inconsistent, veering from Jen’s gothic fantasies of what might have happened to Lana, to flipness of tone and comic dialogue.
The satire is the stronger component of the two: Healey’s middle-class family is drawn with canny-eyed clarity – Jen’s other daughter, Meg, is a lesbian having a baby through artificial insemination and the sibling rival between her and Lana is keenly observed.
So too is modern teenager-hood, from Lana’s Instagram account filled with pictures of plates of food, feet on grass and the “dick pic” she nonchalantly receives to the repartee of mother-daughter bickering. “I thought we might look and see if there’s a film we could all watch on Netflex,” says Jen, to which Lana replies: “It’s Netflix. Netflix. Oh my fucking God. It’s only talked about every single day.”
Healey further complicates Jen’s narrative by turning her into the unreliable narrator. She seems to unravel under the pressure of her daughter’s ordeal and we are made to wonder who the more fragile of the two might be; Lana, it appears, is monitoring her mother’s behaviour while being monitored by her and their mutual surveillance throws doubt over the clarity of Jen’s version of events.
The most compelling aspect of the novel, though, is the painful pathos in Jen and Lana’s relationship; Jen’s helplessness in observing Lana’s depression is piercing. “I want to kill myself,” she tells her mother on the art holiday and “her voice was flat and quiet, toneless and powerful”.
In other scenes, Healey captures Jen’s desperate attempts to be close to her daughter, however much Lana is pulling away into incipient adulthood, which to Jen seems “as if she’d invited some stranger into the house, or some mythical creature, a unicorn or a griffin”. In the end, it is this interpersonal drama and not the clever narrative tics that Healey employs, nor the generic innovation, that gives the novel its heart.
• Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey is published by Viking (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 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
