Chills, but no thrills

‘Mary and Geordie have lost a child …Why should they feel they are entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace.’ Paul Torday’s latest novel is full of such assertions. We are in the Border country, in 2010, and three children have disappeared. Neither the police nor social services can be persuaded to take much interest. ‘Tell you what,’ says the editor of the local paper to Mary, distraught mother of missing Theo, ‘I’ll diary it. If he hasn’t come back in a year’s time we’ll run an anniversary special on him. I can’t say fairer than that.’

The unlikeliness of this response, and the inauthenticity of the tone, undermine what is in some ways a well-crafted novel. There are clumsinesses. Torday makes a not-even-half-baked attempt at local speech patterns and vocabulary, throwing in only the occasional ‘nowt’ or ‘wor lass’.Would Mary and Geordie, a working-class couple in a two-bedroom flat, call their ten-year-old’s room ‘the nursery’? Why would a forester who works outside all day, every day, have a pale face? Would a bright, bookish nine-year-old girl choose The Gruffalo from the mobile library? Why does so much rest on the possession of a certain photograph, when making a copy would be the work of moments?

Phrases and details are often repeated, perhaps to give an air of verisimilitude. ‘Willie parks, walks up the garden path and presses the doorbell’; there’s a lot of this kind of scene-setting. Over and again, some clue or other is described as ‘the missing piece of the jigsaw’. When characters take coffee we are assured that they then ‘sip the hot liquid’.

Despite such flaws, there is momentum, and there is excitement, albeit of a horrible kind. Willie Craig is a restless young man desperate to become an investigative journalist.