The Last Lost Girl by Maria Hoey
Poolbeg £9.99 pp433
“There isn’t any point in trying to be like the people in books — it just doesn’t work. Not only are they not real but the world they live in is not real either.”
Had Maria Hoey listened to her cynical protagonist Jacqueline Brennan, she may never have written her debut novel, The Last Lost Girl.
Set in two time zones, the novel shifts between a hazy Irish summer of 1976 and “afterwards”. Jacqueline, the youngest of Stella and Frank Brennan’s three daughters, is not only “the eyes and ears of the house” but of the story.
Hoey ignores her protagonist’s caution and embraces the fictional world of the novel full throttle. The Brennan family home and the novel’s action are based in the overtly imaginary place Blackberry Lane. Other characters, often twee, have story-bound names such as Dot Candy and Magpie. Yet the characters are not trying to escape the fictional world Hoey has created for them, but the ones they have created for themselves.
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In 1976 Jacqueline is 11 and living in the shadow of her eldest sister Lilly, 15, a beauty queen at the height of her rebellion, who is falling in love with the wrong guy and testing her parents’ patience. A poster on her bedroom door attests: “Stop the world, I want to get off!” When Lilly mysteriously disappears, the lives of the Brennan family are altered forever. Each family member retreats into a version of their lives in order to cope: Frank finds solace in alcohol, Stella in flower arranging and mental oblivion, and Jacqueline in self-imposed exile. Only Gayle, the middle daughter, appears to function well.
The extent of the fiction the family have constructed around their lives is tested 37 years later, as the anniversary of Lilly’s disappearance approaches, when Jacqueline returns to Blackberry Lane and to the search for her sister. The trail leads her to a decaying guesthouse in a seaside town in England, where she encounters other lost souls who help her piece together Lilly’s story as well as her own.
Reminiscent of Maeve Binchy, Hoey’s vivid depiction of Co Dublin local life propels the novel’s pace and she vividly captures the exhilaration and complexity of teenage girlhood. The atmosphere of The Last Lost Girl is nostalgic, not least because Hoey includes an internal soundtrack via Lilly’s portable radio belting out 1970s classics such as Young Hearts Run Free and You Just Might See Me Cry, but also because of the characters’ penchant for looking back. Like Miss Havisham, there is the sense of these characters being governed by the past, trapped forever in time.
Hoey is a keen observer who chronicles the anguish of grief with finesse. The subtlety with which she conveys the stifling powerlessness of a family associated with a missing-person case counterbalances the dialogue’s inclination to over-explain.
This book is not just a moving account of reconciling loss. At its core is a murder mystery, with the characters withholding and releasing information at opportune times. This is where Hoey fully commits her characters to fiction as, unlike most real life missing-person cases, the resolution of the missing Lilly is neatly bound. But as Jacqueline herself reconciles: “Surely the idea was that books should reflect the human experience and not the other way round — so why was it that what she had read always seemed more concrete to her than anything in the real world, while life seemed like a pale imitation?”