The tranquillity of the isolated Scottish village where physician Lachlan McCready has made his home after losing his family is soon to be irrevocably shattered by a quartet of characters blown in on the winds of war. While three English land girls inflame both desires and religious ire, it is a young Jewish evacuee who awakens dormant feelings of paternalism that compel the good doctor to remove the silent waif from the wretched Dougan clan and billet him under his own roof. The mutual healing of man and boy is not without its tensions, however, and elsewhere the ruptures in the social order caused by the outsiders haemorrhage into tragedy. Although this is hardly uncharted emotional terrain, the slow-burning intensity and unforced poignancy of Cannon’s translucent prose holds our attention to the last.
THE WOMAN IN THE PICTURE
by James Wilson
Faber £12.99 pp400
Wilson’s ambitious novel opens in late-1920s Germany, with its hero, Henry Whitaker, seeking the fiancée of the soldier who killed his father in the first world war. Their brief encounter is to shape Henry’s future, initially pitching him into the circle of Arthur Maxted, an august British film director, followed by a career in documentary-making and, finally, an obsession with celluloid. The story line comprises a montage of scenes from Henry’s life intercut with, among other things, his daughter’s quest to learn what happened to her refugee mother. Despite the fact that some of these narratives get confusingly snarled, and there is occasionally a sensation akin to watching a slightly out-of-focus film, this is an ardent love letter to an era when cinema was discovering its voice, by a writer who has clearly found his own.
THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX
by Maggie O’Farrell
Headline Review £14.99 pp245
Any intimation given by the title that the heroine’s disappearance might be born of free will proves bitterly ironic in the case of headstrong Esme, who fails to meet the standards of polite society in 1930s Edinburgh and refuses to be cowed like her sister, Kitty. These blemishes, alloyed with sibling envy and an unutterable tragedy from the past, will see Esme forcibly confined to a mental institution for 60 years and cruelly erased from her family’s history. Although studded with moments of genuine descriptive power (a sexual violation at a dance, the inhumanity of the asylum, the dislocated mutterings of an Alzheimer’s-ravaged Kitty), the intrusive and unpersuasive present-day framing device involving Esme’s great-niece does O’Farrell’s sobering novel more harm than good.
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