The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Maggie O'Farrell)***

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a fascinating book. It’s beautifully and rather poetically written, which seems to be quite unusual for books written in the present tense. These tend to be witty and snappy rather than poetic – although there are exceptions, such as Sophie Hannah’s Hurting Distance.

I wouldn’t call The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox chick lit. It’s probably aimed at an older audience, and there isn’t a lot of romance or humour in it. It’s not an easy book to classify. Perhaps it could be called a mystery story, but it’s certainly not a detective story. It’s frightening and horrific in places, but it probably doesn’t count as horror. There are some sad bits, but you guess quite early on that there is, at the very least, potential for a happy ending. In many ways, The Vanishing Act of Esmé Lennox is a historical novel, but I’ve always found that genre a bit too all-encompassing. Just about any story set in the past counts as historical, whether it is set fifty or fifty thousand years ago; whether it is a happy story or a sad one.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is strange, but compelling. True, parts of the book are quite boring, mostly the parts of the story about Esme’s great-niece Iris, but most of it was intriguing, and I wanted to know what had happened in the past, and how things were going to work out in the future.

But the book doesn’t quite seem finished. A lot of books stop at a really interesting point, leaving you wondering what’s going to happen next, and wishing it wasn’t the end, but so much of the story in this book seems to be missing. It’s quite frustrating to get to the end of the book with so many questions unanswered.

And it’s not just that the book ends prematurely – a lot of the middle of the story seems to be missing too. Although the book spans many years – we see Esme both as a child and as a very old lady – very little of the story is actually told directly. A lot of the time, Iris is listening to Esme telling her story. It’s all very interesting, but it might have been even more gripping if Maggie O’Farrell had shown more from Esme’s point of view and gone into more detail about what happened. There is so much she just touches on that I’d have liked to hear a lot more about. It’s not as though it would make the book too long: it’s actually rather short. There are only 244 pages, and not many words on a page.

Another thing that might have helped would be if Iris had had more of a story. I know the book only covers a very small part of her life, but it would have been good to get to know her as well as we know Esme. There is lots of room in the book for another storyline. All we really get to know about Iris is that she’s dating married Luke, and she once slept with her stepbrother Alex. It’s all very controversial stuff, but it actually makes a bit of an odd contrast with Esme’s story, and there’s no real feeling that the stories are intertwined. There’s no sense that the Esme problem and the boyfriend problem are in any way connected, or that one helps Iris to deal with the other.

But there is a lot I like about this book, and one of them is that, even though there are horrible things happening all over the place. O’Farrell has still created some very lovely characters. Esme, in particular, is very sweet, and her naughtiness is very easy to identify with. Iris is also lovely. Even some of the characters who cause horrible things to happen aren’t so much villains as badly mistaken, and the people who genuinely are nasty still seem like real people, rather than being exaggeratedly villains.