Book review: The Man Who Disappeared

Published on Friday 12 February 2010 18:15

The Man Who Disappeared by Clare Morrall Sceptre, 376pp, £16.99

THIS is a novel so unassuming it may be concealing patches of greatness. But it is not overall a great novel. It opens and closes with stretches of highly controlled, superbly taut, elucidatory prose. In between there is laxity, a comparative failure to grip. The important word here is "comparative". Taken as a whole, Clare Morrall's The Man Who Disappeared, is a highly achieved, engrossing read.

The story it tells is straightforward, yet never simple, for its business is the messiness of relationships, the unknowableness of others – of even ourselves – and of how, suspended by the precarious thread of love we sway in conflict or in harmony, in trust, and in bouts of blind faith, or in errant selfishness – to make lives together, make babies, cross our fingers and hope, when the times are tough, to pull through.

Cue the Kendalls: Kate and Felix with their settled life and three bright kids, imbued with comforts, privilege, prospects, and living in seaside Budleigh Salterton. Kate is studying for a masters, Felix is a partner in an accountancy firm in Exeter. Rory and Millie enjoy a privileged school education; Lawrence, the eldest, and a slacker, taking his golden life (and his parents) greatly for granted, is on his trail through university. The Kendalls, it seems, are the warp and weft of society, weaving their strong, invisible decencies into its fabric, helping it bind.

But something happens to rip them savagely apart. The event in question has taken place by the novel's opening. Felix, who's meant to be in Hamburg doing business, is distracted and at large – a lonely wanderer of pavements – gazing through windows with terrible longing at other people's happy families, a man in self-exile, gripped by despair. We don't know why. Kate, in Ontario, researching Canadian painting, is flying homewards from Toronto quite oblivious of the drama about to unfold. The children are happy in their ignorance, staying with friends.

Yes, Felix has walked away from his life of responsibility; he's in hiding, his face looming guiltily over headlines in the tabloids. He's wanted for fraud. There may be a terrorism connection. All of his assets have now been frozen.

The novel's opening reads like a thriller. Morrall keeps Kate in deep suspense and deeper ignorance about Felix. Where is he hiding? Is he dead? Why did he do it? A man of such probity, a family man, so reliable. Meanwhile the reader gets the full picture – Felix's subterfuge, his penury, his pseudonymous existence, all doomed to be blown.

Kate is penniless, loses the house, cannot afford the children's school fees. Her initial disbelief transforms into anger, a sense of abandonment and frustration, and finally bitterness. She trawls the past for clues: Felix's childhood (she has known him since his schooldays), his being raised by maiden aunts, his intensely close friendship with another boy called George, as quixotic as Felix was dependable. That's where the seed lies, the seed that grew barbs, that gave George his claim on Felix's life, that sealed Felix's fate.

Morrall controls her material brilliantly, taking us deep into Felix's past, scattering clues to his psychology, switching back and forth to the present, to Kate somehow coping, into the heads and hearts of the children, their inner voices pinned to the page. Like the reverse of Felix staring into the windows of others' happiness, the reader stares into the window of their misery, their fretting, their worry and loss, their reluctant adjustment, as they deal with society's judgements about their new status and Felix's crime.

The novel raises a stream of questions: How does our childhood shape our futures? What is fraud? Are all frauds (for instance, limited benefits fraud and corporate fraud) the same? Who is responsible for our actions? What is meant by "respectability"? – is it deeper than mere appearance? And why do we find it so hard to talk to those we love about things that matter?

These issues are raised in flesh and blood, in the characters' actions as well as their thoughts, in a narrative rooted as much in frayed emotions as in the playing out of events. When Felix surfaces everything tips. Kate learns the truth. There are evasions, confrontations, and an outcome that's raw but faithful to every shred of what's gone before. Superbly imagined, it reads like documentary truth.