Simon Baker
Gone Girl
In his new novel, Adam Thorpe has created something that carries hints of An Inspector Calls. We encounter a young innocent, Fay, aged fourteen, who goes missing from the bleak Lincolnshire council estate where she lives with her mentally unstable mother and her feckless, perma-stoned stepfather. We also meet a group of more socially established individuals whose lives she has touched in some way. And we shift between different people’s stories as the novel goes on, seeing things (and seeing Fay) from a number of points of view.
But it’s all much less direct, and therefore more intriguing, than Priestley’s play. What we do not have is a simple tale of innocence destroyed by rapacious greed and thoughtlessness, or anything as lumpen as a moral. Instead, Missing Fay is a book of lives, with Fay in the kind of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trick of a successful mercenary ... was somehow to get on almost as well with your enemies as your allies, since those two positions could be reversed at dizzying speed.'
Sarah Dunant on the life of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/scholar-in-arms
'McDormand has come closer to Lady Macbeth in some of her previous grimly comic performances ... Here she can convey only the banality of evil, as when she fussily curtails the banquet after Macbeth’s hallucination.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/come-thick-night
'"Extinct" comprises eighty-five essays on defunct objects, from arsenic wallpaper to the Zeppelin. The format does not immediately inspire confidence ... but "Extinct" turns out to be more satisfying than one might expect.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ode-to-an-ashtray