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From The Times

September 30, 2006

Distant relations grow closer

review by Zoë Paxton

MAGGIE O’FARRELL writes books that give you what you want. Like Sarah Waters or Douglas Kennedy she displays a gift for storytelling that makes her novels almost ridiculously pleasurable to read.

Instantaneous characters, suspenseful plotting and unequivocal observations of human behaviour make it virtually impossible not to fall under her spell. She also writes about love a lot — which has always put her work at risk of being written off as chick-lit’s second cousin. It could not be further removed. Despite their preoccupation with the Sturm und Drang of romantic love, each of her three previous novels — After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover and The Distance Between Us — are fine literary endeavours. But it is with her latest that she really pushes the boat out. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox begins in 1930s Edinburgh. The younger daughter of a well-to-do family, unable to conform to the strictures of polite society, Esme Lennox commits such crimes as walking barefoot down the driveway, forgetting to wear her gloves and displaying an aversion to marriage.

All hell breaks loose when she is found, aged 16, dancing in front of the mirror in her mother’s silk negligée. She is incarcerated in Cauldstone, a mental asylum. This tragic and compelling story is told through the memories of Esme who, 60 years later, still lives in Cauldstone. In common with O’Farrell’s previous heroines, the young Esme is an intense and independent young woman with an eye for small things. Sitting with her governess and elder sister, unable to concentrate on the arithmetic before her, she looks instead at “the dust swarming in the light beams, the way knots and markings in the wood of the table flow like water”. Decades later, despite imprisonment and cruelty, the older Esme has hung on to her keen eye and spirit.

At the same time, a few miles down the road, O’Farrell presents us with Esme’s great-niece and only surviving relative: Iris is a chic young woman who runs a vintage clothes shop. Their stories converge when the authorities phone to explain that the asylum is to be closed and Iris must house the old woman elsewhere. Iris brings Esme home to her flat.

O’Farrell’s characteristically lyrical writing (sometimes criticised as overblown) is here sparer, more elegant. In one touching scene Esme, sitting in the car with Iris, attempting to process her sudden emergence into the world, pretends to fall asleep because “she needs to think”. Iris reaches over and turns off the radio; this is “the single nicest act that Esme has witnessed in a long time. It almost makes her cry”.

Although Iris’s tale serves a purpose, Esme’s story is so shocking, heartbreaking and fascinating that you might find yourself wishing O’Farrell had devoted the whole book to it.

Maggie O’Farrell appears at THE TIMES Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 9. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com