"Missing" by Alison Moore (Salt, 2018)

Instead of info-dumping, the main character, Jessie, has recollections rather unconvincingly sparked off by events and objects. We learn that she was born in Cambridgeshire, moving to Hawick Scotland after her first marriage (to Brendan) ended (13 years before the time of the book). She lives in a house where she believes her great-great-grandmother used to live. In Wawick she married Will, who left without warning one morning. She's a translator, 49, with a son Paul (about 30). In chapter 1 she's at a conference. Chapter 2 flashes back to 1985, when she was 18 and on holiday with her older sister Gail, Gail's husband Gary and their daughter Eleanor. Then there are a few lines on a page, including "I found myself waking up feeling homesick and thinking of Jessie, and I decided I would send her a message; I would tell her: I'm on my way home". Little messages in this vein appear between other chapters too.

There are early hints that Eleanor is missing and Jessie is implicated. Or does the title refer to Will, who's not been in touch since he left months before? Or Paul?

On p.70 there are interesting plots of stories she's translating, including ghost stories. She wonders whether her house is haunted. She's reading a biography of DH Lawrence - "Lawrence was now abroad with no desire ever to go home again, while Frieda struggled to gain access to the children she had abandoned" (p.76). Another theme emerges of codes, misunderstandings and communication - her translation work, Frieda being accused of messaging to Germans; Jessie leaving messages in library books, etc. She's deaf in one ear. Why?

She's apparently been showing too much interest in the 17 y.o. boy next door, her unawareness of this perhaps a sign of her mental state.

She meets Robert, a near stranger, in her local, tells him about some ghost poems, goes home to find that her old mug's been broken. Next time they eat together she sleeps with him. On p.140, about 80% through the book, the two of them are in the local. Stewart's there. Jessie tells Robert that when Will was driving a train he hit Stewart's son, who was still in a coma. Will couldn't cope with work after. Um ... it's a bit late to tell us about that.

The inter-chapter notes to us become postcards to her. She recognises Will's handwriting. It's nearly Xmas. She stays a night with her sister. Gary's never forgiven her. She discovers that she's pregnant. She texts Robert about it. When she sees him on the street he says "Your house is just a house ... There is no ghost" (p.170). She considers having an abortion. In the final chapter, Will arrives at the empty house. There are hints that Jessie's caught a train, or plans to catch one soon. The final sentence is "The house is quiet, apart from the sound of it trying to settle" (p.170).

Everything (a jigsaw, a cup) is an aide-memoire, setting off a cascade of memories or analogies. Mood is generated by those unrelated snippets and flights of fancy -

• Eleanor's favourite story was a picture book about Frogmen: amphibious creatures that lived in the vast, deep sea but sometimes surfaced ... And these Frogmen lived alone, and they were lonely, but in the end, in the final pages of the picture book, they began to find one another, and to make friends, and to fall in love ... The book fell through the railings and into the sea ... 'Perhaps a Frogman will find it,' said Jessie (p.18)
• a little girl was toing and froing beneath a street lamp, running into and out of the wash of orange light. With an outstretched hand, the child seemed to be trying to touch the lamplight and then - as if to see if it felt any different - the darkness (p.25)
• She had, of course, more than one great-great-grandmother: she had eight of them, a good number for a dinner party, she thought. She imagined having them all over, all the great-great-grandmothers, and cooking a huge lasagne for them. Mentally, she sat them down around her dining table - it would necessitate putting the extra leaf in the table to make it long enough, and she would have to bring in the piano stool and a couple of folding chairs (p.28)
• She had read a book about scientists recording the faint sound of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, the collision causing waves that could still be detected now. People were always finding things that you had not realised anyone was looking for. She would not even have known where to start (p.31)
• For Jessie, in childhood, the real treats had been in tins: alphabet soup or spaghetti hoops, which were like alphabet pasta but just the Os, the language of ghosts (p.69)

She's good at significant detail though the symbolism can be pushed too far - e.g. on p.51 there's "Her eyes strayed from her book to a crack at the top of the wall ... disappeared under the doorframe, heading out into the hallway. Or perhaps it had started out there and was coming in ... When she switched off the light, she could not see the crack, but of course it was still there". On p.132 there's "She ought to have run, like a greyhound let out of its box. She always felt so sorry for those skinny greyhounds, so thin they might just snap, pelting after a hare that they could never ever catch".

Since 2012 Alison Moore has published 4 novels for adults and a book of short stories. She's not been ignored (2 of the novels were Observer Books of the Year) but should she be more highly regarded than she is? She says that she "naturally seem[s] to write short novels, all under 50,000 words" which perhaps doesn't help. And she's still with her first publisher.

Other reviews

• Anna Aslanyan (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.)
• Nina Allen
• Hamish Robertson (In The Lighthouse, the reader is drip-fed information about two very different lives, both charged with unhappiness, that intersect explosively in a hotel in Germany. So compelling is the build-up, that the climax is silent — as if the explosion had beaten the reader to the punch. The same highly engineered, drip-feed technique is applied in Missing, but the crisis never comes. What does come is more drift-like, rhythmical and mysterious: change.)
• Cath Barton (Reading Missing for the second time I found it multi-layered, full of reflection on the nature of our experience, and yet written with such immediacy and freshness that the pages fly past. There is tragedy at its core, and yet the characters carry on, as people do.)
• bunchmunch

"Death and the Seaside" by Alison Moore (Salt, 2016)

164 pages. In chapter 1 (third person) we meet Susan who left home on a motorbike and lives above a seaside pub in Seatown where she's a barmaid. In chapter 2 (third person) we meet Bonnie, who's nearly 30 and is moving out of her parents' house into a flat in Slash Lane. She didn't complete her lit degree. She went through a phase of jumping off piers. For a while, lit-crit habits affected her appreciation of novels and affected Real Life too. Bonnie is rather suggestible, has a record of failure, and has trouble distinguishing between reality and fancy. She has 2 cleaning jobs, one in a drug research lab. While watching the Director's Cut of Blade Runner she thinks "How disturbing it would be ... to discover, just like that, that you were not what you thought you were, that you were not real" (p.120). She's writing a story about Susan, who lives above a pub. Her landlady, Sylvia, visits her, asks her about her life and her writing. Her father provides comic relief.

In chapter 5 (first person), we read that "All of Bonnie's unfinished stories have been printed out and kept together in the same place: in the drawer of my grandmother's old Mission desk ... I was told, when I was little: 'Sylvia, you must not touch this desk'". Sylvia thinks that Bonnie uses the Sea as a metaphor for Death. There are a few pages of notes that Bonnie wrote for her never-completed thesis.

Sylvia's interested in psychology, especially experiments and hypnosis. She had to leave university because her experiments weren't ethical. We learn that years before she had run an experiment about subliminal messages (about failing and jumping through upstairs windows) on unsuspecting members of the public, including the 7 year-old Bonnie. She tries to track down the source for Seatown, comparing pubs of towns with similar names, etc. She takes Bonnie on holiday to the town (driving past where a nightclub used to be, called "The Sea Around Us"). Sylvia claims that the holiday will help Bonnie finish her short story about Susan. "It was the strangest thing, to walk inside the Hook. It was like walking into a story, although, at the same time, it wasn't" (p.138). Bonnie's room above the pub is strangely similar to Susan's, similar mysterious events unfolding, plus other unsettling details - "there were three doors in the walls, like one of those riddles in which you have to make the right choice because one of the doors had something really terrible behind it. One of the doors was in the the corner diagonally across from the bed, and the other two were facing that one. She did not know which of them led to the outside world, and which just led into a cupboard" (p.143). "Facing the window, she found that her reflection was missing, as if somehow she did not exist, but then she saw that the window was wide open" (p.154)

We're led to think that Bonnie jumps from her window in the night. Actually though, what we've read is the final section of Bonnie's story, that she's just written down. Wandering into the next room she discovers notes and CCTV system. She realises that it's all a set-up, an elaborate experiment. She finds her missing phone, phones her mother and is told that an Animal Lib group has released animals from the lab where she works. She finds Sylvia dead on the pavement under her window. She'd been trying to etch something on the outside of the window. Finally there's a neat symbolic ending - "Bonnie released the handbrake and pulled unsteadily away from the kerb, away from the beach, away from the encroaching sea."

The writing's dense with detail and nice touches - e.g.

• Bonnie's morning cleaning job was at an amusement arcade on the high street. She walked there past an old house that had the ghost of an advert painted on its side wall, clinging faintly to the brickwork: EAT ... She passed a chip shop and high-rise buildings and a car park from which a man had jumped, the son of someone her mother knew. She passed a church, with posters stapled to a board outside, saying 'GOD WILL SAVE YOU'. She passed the community centre on Waterside Close, with scalloped stone edging around the doorway, and happy cartoon characters stuck to the windows, or starting to come away. She might once have gone to the playground there; she had the vaguest sense of having been abandoned in that building. There was graffiti on the exterior walls that said things like 'HOPE' and 'BOOM!' (p.18)

• the sea was the open side, where structure ceased. The barrier, depending on how you looked at it, both was and was not there, like a theatre's fourth wall (p.50)
• 'Have you ever held a conch shell to your ear to hear the sound of the sea? ... 'Your teacup ... would work just as well, or your hand cupped over your ear' (p.67)
• She lit a cigarette. When she inhaled, the tip of her cigarette glowed orange like a dashboard warning light. She leaned over the sill to blow out smoke rings, which floated up, dispersing. They looked like cartoon wailing or surprise: o O O. She took a final puff, dropped the butt and watched it spark on the slabs. A cyclist on the pavement steered around it (p.100)

• The woman behind the counter said, 'You have to watch this programme they're showing at nine o'clock tonight on the BBC.' 'Oh,' said Bonnie. 'All right.' The woman glanced up, and Bonnie realised that the woman was using a hands-free device; she was talking to somebody else. 'Sorry,' said Bonnie. 'You were talking to somebody else, weren't you?' 'Yes,' said the woman, but she had already looked away again and her reply might have been meant for the person on the other end of the phone. (p.123)

It's neat and impressive.

Other reviews

• Sarah Crown (Meditations on mortality are deftly transposed to a banal English holiday resort in a strikingly ambitious novel that never gives itself airs ... Dense, complex, thought-provoking, it manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise, high-octane thriller and literary interrogation)
• storgy (While the subject matter of a frustrated writer echoing her character and the motif of life-imitating-art-imitating-life may sound as if the novel is an exercise in metafiction or fictocriticism, Death and the Seaside only ever flirts with elements of those genres. ... in its intermittent preoccupation with critical theory and psychoanalysis, as well as the muted, detached quality of its prose, the novel often recalls the French nouveau roman, though again in its stylistic flourishes rather than in any spirit of experimentalism. ... Moore can be heavy-handed occasionally. Her depictions of Bonnie’s parents are fairly two-dimensional, particularly Bonnie’s father, who is never any further fleshed out than the bare minimum required for him to perform his dramatic function. Narrative threads are dropped and either not revisited at all or only very cursorily resolved. Early in the novel, some space is devoted to the development of the relationship between Bonnie and her co-worker, Chi, who is subsequently written out without much explanation, only to be replaced with another character, Fiona, who performs a substantially similar role in the story. I am at a loss to see what was the point of that exercise. ... At other times, however,there are clever, subtle pleasures to be found. ... This is not a work of great ambition. Moore may well be capable of a major artistic statement, but this is not it. Death and the Seaside is brief, focused, and (for the most part) tightly constructed.)
• Isabel Berwick (While she is both gifted stylist and talented creator of a new English grotesque, Moore’s technique left me admiring, but also uninvolved. The oddness of it all, and the shifts in narrative, gives a remote feeling, leaving the reader adrift at times. And that, in turn, may be Moore’s intention all along. )
• Nina Allan (Alison Moore is one of the most gifted and interesting writers of weird fiction in Britain today. ... There is an atmosphere of threat around Bonnie that is made all the more discomfiting by the fact that Bonnie herself seems utterly impervious to it. ... I’ve read all three of Moore’s novels to date, plus a good number of her short stories, and in all of them I find this unifying feeling of unspecified threat. Not ghosts exactly, nothing so concrete, so predictable – yet ghosts nonetheless, the ghosts we create ourselves, simply by living our lives, by having pasts and making mistakes and feeling regret. ... Moore’s landscapes – her insistence on lived, inhabited reality – are achingly familiar: seventies housing estates, seaside promenades, motorway service stations, bits of waste ground in permanent danger of being tarmacked over. They are made strange by the heightened perceptions of her protagonists, and by the intimate personal knowledge of these same landscapes, these situations that we ourselves bring into the narrative by the act of reading it.)
• Maryom (In another writer's hands, this would easily have turned into a high drama psychological thriller, Moore takes an altogether subtler approach, letting the menace slowly ooze out)
• Lee Wright

"The Pre-War House and other stories" by Alison Moore (Salt, 2013)

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"The Lighthouse" by Alison Moore (Salt, 2012)

Futh is about to separate from his wife. He decides to take a week-long circular walking trip in Germany. When he was still school-age, just after his mother left his father, his father took him on a hike in Germany, the last time he'd been on a ferry, so he has opportunities to reminisce.

He starts talking to a man caled Carl in the ferry. They get on, and Futh drives them to Carl's pampering mother where he has a snack before continuing his journey alone. On his first night back on dry land Futh stays at the "Hellhaus" hotel in Hellhaus, where he'll also spend his last night. Some chapters are from Ester's PoV. She's the hotelier, casually unfaithful. Her husband, Bernard, is rude and sometimes violent to her lovers (assumed and otherwise). In the penultimate chapter, having struggled on the walk, injuring feet and hands, Futh strays into Ester's bedroom. At the end of the book, Carl can't see Futh on the return ferry where they'd planned to meet again. Carl "cannot even remember the man's name. It was a name which makes him think of froth, and the powdery wings of a moth" (p.182).

The characters don't do much thinking or Proustian reflection. Though there's much about the past, it's actions rather than thoughts that are recalled, and though Futh always checks new rooms for future escape routes, the momentum's very much centred on the here and now. It works well. Here for example is the novel's start

Futh stands on the ferry deck, holding on to the cold railings with his soft hands. The wind pummels his body through his new anorak, deranges his thinning hair and brings tears to his eyes. It is summer and he was not expecting this. He has not been on a ferry since he was twelve, when he was abroad for the first time with his father

The paragraph begins with the main character's name, then zooms out to the place and the person's body. Then the time, then the past and other people. Neat. Less felicitous is a sentence from the 2nd paragraph - "When they sat down, the lights were still up, and there was no one else in there" - the "down ... up ... there ... there" sequence is awkward, and on p.7 there's "sorting out what to keep and what to throw away. The ferry ploughs on across the North Sea, and home gets further and further away" where the repeated sentence-ending draws attention. Minor quibbles.

Kenny and Futh have known each other since infant school -

Kenny and Futh used to stand at their bedroom windows at lights out, facing one another across their back gardens, each with a torch, flashing messages through the darkness. If like like Morse code except that it didn't mean anything. Kenny would flash-flash-flash and Futh would flash-flash-flash back; Kenny would flash-pause-flash and Futh would send it back. Eventually the game would stop. it was, for Futh, like looking at a lighthouse on the horizon at night. There was this flashing of light and then nothing, and you waited for the next flash, looking at where the light had been and where it would be again but you were looking at darkness (p.10)

I like that. Kenny's mother, Gloria, has an affair with Futh's father. Futh marries Angela, who has an affair with Kenny that might have become physical on the wedding night.

Lighthouses recur, part of the web of symbolism -

• He carries a silver model lighthouse wherever he goes. It used to contain perfume. It was his mother's. It was taken by Futh's father from his father's brother, "uncle Ernst", without permission.
• "Hellhaus" means "lighthouse"
• He went with his parents near a lighthouse on the day when they split up. The event is revisited more than once.
• Ester has the wooden version of the lighthouse. She steals Futh's silver one.

Repeatedly we're told that there are still shipwrecks despite lighthouses being built. There are many parallels between the characters - Ester has a Venus flytrap. So has Gloria. Gloria's has a moth in it. In Futh's hotel room, a moth lands on a book. Ester likes perfumes. Ether's mother sold perfumes. Futh stole his mother's perfume. His job involves synthesising smells. His mother smoked, Kenny smoked, Ester smokes - all of them secretively at times. Futh wants to be mothered, and likes older women pampering him. He marries a woman who has his mother's name. He's left by his wife for the same reason that his mother left his father. There are repeated moths, pink dresses, and childlessness. Are Ester's and Futh's families connected?

Chapter 4 ends rather differently to any other chapter.

In the night, there will be a storm. It will be brief, if a little violent, and hardly anyone will even realise it has occurred, although they might hear it raging, thundering, in their dreams. In the morning, by the time people are up and about, the sun will be out again, and the rain-soaked pavements will be dry, and there will be very little evidence of damage. (p.39)

I think the novel has something for everyone. There's crisp characterisation, a plot (it would be ironic indeed if Futh at the end falls victim to violence because he explored, because he was suspected of sexual adventure and cuckoldry), and an auteurish control over a mesh of repeated motifs.

Other reviews

• Anthony Cummins (Guardian)
• Boyd Tonkin (Independent)
• Philip Womack (Telegraph)
• Simon Savidge
• The Bookshelf
• Abigail Williams