Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon

During the Persephone Readathon, I chose to read Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon – which is rather an anomaly for Persephone, in that it was published in 1981. AND the author is still alive! I can only think of a couple other Persephone authors in that category. So, why did Persephone Books step so far from their usual territory of interwar literature to a novel about the kidnap of a child?

For that is what Still Missing is about – it was later adapted into the film Without a Trace. And yet it’s worlds away from the sort of book that might be conjured up in your mind. There certainly seems to be a trend in modern crime fiction for depicting the worst possible things that can happen to children or women. Whether the authors are doing that gratuitously or to expose a troubling trend in the real world, they’re not books I want to read. Whereas Still Missing is far more about the psychology of a mother going through this appalling predicament, day by day by day.

That is the power of the novel. Nothing is rushed. We agonise alongside Susan, feeling as though we are deep in her mind, even though the novel is in the third person. As for her son, Alex, all we see is him leaving for school – and not getting there. He disappears from the novel as suddenly as he disappears from the neighbourhood.

It may be that one loss helps to prepare you for the next, at least in developing a certain rueful sense of humour about things you’re too old to cry about. There’s plenty of blather, some of it true, about turning pain into growth, using one blow to teach you resilience and to make you ready for the shock of the next one. But the greater truth is that life is not something you can go into training for. There was nothing in life that Susan Selky could have done to prepare for the breathtaking impact of losing her son.

I don’t know what would actually happen when a young boy goes missing, nor (more to the point) what would have happened in 1981 – but I’m willing to believe it would be rather what Gutcheon depicts. There is the initial flurry of media interest and police action – questioning her estranged husband, getting statements from everybody in the area, putting everybody at their disposal. Her friends are either too horrified to talk to her, too awkward to know how to help, or (a select few) an essential support. Gutcheon shows people’s reactions perfectly, and dryly explains how and why people react as they do.

“Are you sure there’s nothing… funny about her?” his wife asked.

“What do you mean?”

“She was so cool,” said Pat. Uh-huh, though Menetti. Now it starts. It can’t happen to me. It happened to her, she lost her kid, but if there’s something funny about her, then there’s a reason it could happen to her but it couldn’t happen to me. Now starts the drawing away, the pulling aside, the setting the Selkys apart.

Chief among the policemen is Menetti, in that conversation above. One of the reasons the novel is in the third person (I suspect) is so that we can jump into Menetti’s mind instead – he is an intensely sympathetic character, trying to help Susan as much as possible while also maintaining procedure. She begs him not to waste time following the lead of her ex-husband – she is adamant that it has nothing to do with him – but Menetti must follow the (fruitless) most likely option. And we see him when he goes home too, anxious and resigned, the impact on his own family life all too unavoidable.

Still Missing is very gripping, but not because it is full of event. It is full of tension, but it is mostly the tension of nothing happening – of friends and journalists gradually losing interest; of the leads drying up. And of Susan’s agony remaining just as painful and stark throughout – of her own measures to find Alex growing increasingly desperate. Gutcheon judges the pacing brilliantly almost all the time – I say ‘almost’ because there are a few clunky bits, thrown in for plot and red herrings, that don’t sit well with the rhythm of the rest of the narrative.

I’m still not sure it quite fits as a Persephone, and the 1980s still lies between nostalgia and modern in a slightly off-colour, dated interim state – but it’s certainly an involving and beautifully judged read. The premise has become worn through re-use, but Gutcheon takes it back to essentials, and the novel is the more powerful and personal because of it.