Review - Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

This week I thought I’d review Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey. I finished it last night so the timing was perfect and on top of that, Emma Healey is a relatively recent graduate from the UEA MA creative writing course and I'm always interested in the authors that come out of UEA.

Elizabeth is Missing is about an 82 year old woman named Maud whose memory is in decline. It starts off with small things – Maud going down to the shop and buying masses of tinned peaches, not remembering she did the same yesterday and the day before – and gets worse as the novel progresses. However, there is one thing that she fixates on. While she’s forgetting her children’s names and where she lives, she never fails to remember that her friend Elizabeth seems to be missing.

The novel is like a mix between Lisa Genova’s Still Alice and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, resulting in it being nicknamed Gone Gran when it was published in 2014. Healey ties in the mystery of Elizabeth with the mystery of Maud’s sister going missing when Maud was a child, back in 1946. The paralleling of an incredibly relatable modern day narrative with stories from post-war England is beautifully constructed and written. Readers can sympathise with Maud’s plight – one that many elderly people suffer from and we probably all have at least second hand experience of – whilst also immersing themselves in the 1940s culture and fashion that is described in Maud’s memories.

The unreliable narration from a character with Alzheimer’s keeps the mystery alive throughout the entire book. But at the same time, you never find yourself distrusting Maud. The narration is so rooted in Maud’s head, we understand her thought processes and her memory loss in a way that highlights the fact that this could happen to anyone. Healey writes about Alzheimer’s with compassion and sensitivity and it’s written in such a realistic way that I found myself doubting my own mental faculties whenever I put the book down.

I’ve heard it said that Elizabeth is Missing ‘loses its way’ three quarters of the way through and becomes repetitive. But I think repetitiveness is very hard to avoid in a book in which the narrator can’t remember what she did an hour before. And Healey, in most cases, tends to avoid this repetitive feeling by bringing in a new flashback to the 1940s that introduces a new clue about the disappearance of Maud’s sister and sparks our interest all over again.

I personally found the mystery a little predictable. Close to the end of the book I had guessed what had happened to Maud’s sister and my suspicions were confirmed. However, I’m not sure this predictability is necessarily a bad thing, not after reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in which the author seems to pluck a strange ending out of the air in order to not be predictable (you can see my review of Gone Girl here: Gone Girl Review).  

I would recommend this book to anyone. It’s an easy read and the present tense, first person narration – a style I think most authors would struggle to keep up for an entire novel – flows beautifully throughout.

Thanks for reading!

Book Review - Gone Girl by GIllian Flynn

This week I thought I’d try my hand at a book review. Because, although this is a creative writing blog, one of the best ways a writer can improve their own writing is to read as much as they can.

I am going to review Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a crime thriller novel that, as I’m sure you know, has recently been made into a film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.

Nick Dunne arrives home to his American suburban house to find that his wife, Amy, is missing and his house is trashed. As the investigation progresses, the police start to realise that the evidence doesn’t match up and Nick starts to look more and more guilty.

Gone Girl fits perfectly into the crime thriller genre but it is so much more than that. It is different, unpredictable. The unreliable narration is very clever in leading the reader in one direction, fooling them into thinking they’re figuring out all the clues, and then revealing they were wrong from the start.

On top of that, the narration is so easy to read and beautifully written. With a lot of novels, I find I’m very conscious of the fact that I’m reading a constructed narrative, that the author probably spent hours poring over their metaphors and picking the perfect analogies. Gone Girl is completely different. The narration feels natural, it flows perfectly. It feels like you’re having a chat with the narrator.

Furthermore, Gone Girl opens your eyes to areas of social conduct that are taken for granted and shouldn’t be. Such as  the concept of the ‘cool girl’; the idea that every girl trying to find a boy pretends to be the girl who drinks beer, plays video games and doesn’t mind if her boyfriend cancels on her to play poker with his friends. Whereas no man ever pretends to watch gossip girl, drink wine and knit in order to attract a girlfriend. Gillian Flynn is very clever at creating stereotypical characters (without you realising it) only to subvert them in the second half of the novel in order to open your eyes to social issues such as these.

Gone Girl is an absolute page turner for 50% of the book. However, the book starts to disappoint in the second half. By this point in the novel, we have found out who’s behind Amy’s disappearance and all of the literary tension that kept us reading before this point leaks out. The characters become less realistic and relatable. And the most disappointing part of all is the ending. It falls flat of the fantastic thriller you’ve read up to this point and seems almost anticlimactic. When reading it, I felt fairly certain that Gillian Flynn was merely trying to find an ending that was ‘unpredictable’ rather than an ending that would satisfy her readers.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone. It is a quick, easy, fun read. However, I would warn them not to expect the second half to be as good as the first.