“How does it end?” you often ask yourself as you read a book, trying to imagine where the plot is leading you. Alison Moore’s fourth novel, coming six years after her Man Booker-shortlisted debut, The Lighthouse, is one of those books that, once you immerse yourself in them, makes the question irrelevant: it would be like trying to guess how your life might end instead of living it.
The protagonist, Jessie, is in her late 40s. Her life appears uneventful: she lives in Scotland with a cat and a dog, her second husband having recently left her. The novel’s title refers to the losses she has suffered and witnessed; a list so long you can’t help thinking that some of what’s missing must eventually come back. Will Jessie be reunited with her son, who won’t reply to her texts? Will she see her niece again? Will her husband return? However, you soon realise that the narrative has its own rules, so you should let its flow carry you at its own, precisely measured speed.
There are also questions over whether Jessie’s hearing will be restored, and with it, her way with words, “which had become, inside her head, muffled, hazy at the edges … trickier to use”. A literary translator, she feels that “her choice made a difference”, but once a project is finished, it’s as if “all those months of fretting over this word or that word, deliberating over this or that turn of phrase, had been for no one but herself”. Translation, her experience confirms, is a lonely job, like any other art.
As losses accumulate and ghosts multiply, the book begins to resemble a gothic tale, conflating the tragic and the mundane, betrayal and cooking, loneliness and “newspapers and phones and children and meal deals”. You suspect that some of these leads might be false, but the current of Moore’s prose is stronger than the pull of any potential plot twists. The main narrative is interspersed with flashbacks to 1985 and with anonymous messages, in which someone tells Jessie they are coming home. The interruptions grow longer; the tension increases. And then, without breaking the rhythm, Moore swiftly brings the story to an end, reminding you that life can be a realist drama and a romance, a horror story and an existential novel – often all of these things at once, and more.
- Missing by Alison Moore (Salt Publishing, £9.99). To order a copy for £8.49, 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.
