A host of unquiet spirits

As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss so absolute and cataclysmic that there seems no possible way forward; when the future seems not merely unthinkably disrupted but also irrelevant. For the majority of people lucky enough to live out their days beyond war zones, barbaric regimes and disaster areas, such events usually come no closer than a news item; but even — perhaps especially — when the calamity is near at hand, we so often find ourselves at once desperate to empathise and yet incapable of imagining.

Mary, whom we gradually discover has lost both her young daughters, understands that people can’t understand; often, she can barely understand herself. Her default position has become one of passivity and inertia, even as her husband Graham attempts to restore some form of normality by relocating them to a country cottage. She doesn’t want to work, or to garden, or to play with the dog Graham buys her; instead, she wants to continue contemplating what has happened to her, in case it ever becomes possible to believe.

Myerson has frequently written about maternal loss in novels such as Laura Blundy and Then, and she has also been abidingly interested in exploring the supernatural, the long-forgotten past and the techniques of suspense fiction to convey the transfer of traumatic emotion between people, places and times. This novel is no exception, for it is about seepage as well as stoppage; interwoven with Mary’s third-person story is teenage Eliza’s, which took place about a century previously. As Myerson’s format suggests — the two narratives are not separated into discrete chapters, but run in and out of one another — past and present do not simply intrude, but profoundly shape one another.