Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Genre: Mystery, General Fiction
Read: 26th July 2018
Purchase: Amazon
★★★★★ 5 stars
But at the heart of the story is a 70 year old mystery of Maud's missing older sister, Sukey. The two stories run side by side throughout, each intermingling with Maud's own memories of the past and confusing them with the present.
A bittersweet novel, ELIZABETH IS MISSING is both humourous and poignant as we witness Maud's obsession with finding Elizabeth - and dementia sufferers do obsess over some things as they try to hold on to some normalcy in their declining world - and deterioration as her dementia worsens. I think Emma Healey has done a wonderful job in exploring the fragility of memory and one's identity through the eyes of someone with dementia, and the combining of the two mysteries will keep you glued to this book.
The opening Prologue is a conversation between Maud and Elizabeth, in Elizabeth's garden, where Maud unearths a long forgotten piece of her past. In the first instance, it seems an innocuous find despite Maud's fixation on it before the story develops into the search for Elizabeth. Maud calls Elizabeth, even repeatedly visiting her house and trying to gain access in an attempt to find out what has become of her friend. Her investigation is relentless as is her determination that something has happened to her. Maud's daughter Helen visits daily, to find numerous cups of tea lined up on the mantlepiece, a growing number of tins of peaches in the cupboards and her mother demanding that Elizabeth is missing and "why won't anyone believe me?" or do anything about it. Maud recognises her declining memory and begins jotting herself notes which she carries with her everywhere - to the point of having a pocketful of scraps of colourful paper with random notes and messages on that soon, because of the vagueness of each note, even Maud isn't sure how they relative they are. Though the story is written solely from Maud's perspective in the first person, you can see Helen's constant exasperation at the same questions her mother asks day after day after day. "What is the best time to grow marrows?" is the most common as well as her obsession that "Elizabeth is missing". Both comments relate to the story that is locked within Maud's memories of the past though she can't grasp the relevance or its importance. Most people around her just pass her obsessions off as somewhat senile, and their impatience at having to constantly repeat the same thing over and over to her but never seeming to get through.
Sadly, this is an all too real concept with sufferer's and those with loved ones with dementia. It IS incredibly frustrating to others at having to constantly repeat oneself, at their insistence that they were never told or they didn't know, at their obsessions with certain things - it is very frustrating for the caregiver and loved ones of the sufferer. However, what is unique about this story is that it is told from the perspective of someone with dementia and it is cleverly done so in a way that helps give you an insight into the constant confusion the sufferer must feel in their daily battle with the insidious disease. While some sentences and thought processes disclosed by Maud in her monologuing may not seem to make much sense to us, it does show how one with dementia might think and how their thought process might be and how it may wander into various avenues of confusion.
Back to Maud and her investigation into Elizabeth's disappearance, Maud then finds herself reflecting on another time she was in a similar situation 70 years ago when her sister Sukey (Susan) went missing just after the war. Both stories run parallel to each other as the reader sees the similarities and how Maud begins to confuse both events. As the story develops and time goes on, you begin to see Maud's obvious decline when her confusion becomes entwined and her comments make absolutely no sense to anyone, but to the reader we can see where she has drawn the parallels from 70 years ago to now. To anyone else, Maud's comments about someone named Frank or Douglas would mean nothing to her daughter Helen or grand daughter Katy, but the reader can see something in the meaning of Maud's reference, and her confusion just only reiterates her obvious deterioration. But still she insists that Elizabeth is missing whilst revisiting the disappearance of her sister 70 years before, and the events that followed. And soon, Maud remembers less and less about the present and begins to remember more and more about the past, leading to a penultimate climax where the story inevitably began.
ELIZABETH IS MISSING is very hard to review a book like this without giving too much away. You really do need to read it and make the journey of discovery along with Maud to fully appreciate it. You will laugh, you will cry, and by the end you won't want to let Maud go long after you have read the last page and unravelled both mysteries.
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