All in the Mind

The madwoman of the attic was a Victorian stereotype. This is an update

A ship from the colonies berths at Tilbury, in Scotland, in the 1930s and four people disembark: Father, mother, two daughters, to all appearances the functional family. But in their baggage is a past that must never be spoken of. And among them is a girl who refuses to fit the mould in appearance, behaviour and intellect. Esme8217;s hair is wild; her sister Kitty8217;s sits close to her head. Esme8217;s moods are called 8220;turns8221;; Kitty never has any. Esme wants to go to university; Kitty accepts that their father will never have any of his daughters work for a living.

A generation later, yet another girl bursts onto the Edinburgh landscape. Iris is unconventional, bohemian, freethinking. She crops her hair, runs a second-hand clothes shop, flits between lovers. In another time, she could have been Esme.

Fusing the classic Gothic novel with the family saga, Maggie O8217;Farrell creates a story that hits disturbingly close to home. Siblings are the author8217;s speciality8212;her previous novels, too, investigated similar relationships8212; but in The Vanishing Act8230;, she deliberately disfigures the bedrock zone into a crumbling precipice. Parents alienate, siblings betray, society closes in until the very foundations of life are distorted beyond comprehension.

It8217;s enough to drive anyone over the edge, and it provides the perfect backdrop for O8217;Farrell to explore the border regions between sanity and insanity. If the madwoman of the attic was a Victorian stereotype, The Vanishing Act8230; is a 21st century update that acquires peculiarly poignant resonances in a country where derangement is still considered a disease.

Sixty-one years, five months, four days after Esme is committed, salvation comes in the form of Iris. Neither knew of the existence of the other, but over a weekend fraught with contradictory tensions, the two nonconformists bond in surprising ways until the macabre denouement that rivals Dahl.

For all the feminist flagwaving, though,

O8217;Farrell never allows the story to slacken. A critic once described one of her three previous novels as a striptease; the talent is perfected in The Vanishing Act8230;. Zigzagging between the meanderings of an Alzheimer8217;s-afflicted mind, the controlled thoughts of the institutionalised insane and the omniscient account of a commitment-phobic, the tightly coiled narrative unspools as smoothly as a skein of silk.

Every action in the saga has its equal and opposite equivalent somewhere: If negativity overwhelms the relationship between Esme and her sibling, Iris8217;s 8220;unnatural8221; closeness with her stepbrother is its moral antipode. As a child, Esme clung to a beloved baby brother killed by typhoid; later in life, she is forcibly separated from yet another child.

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Though the mirror effect is delicately nuanced, Esme8217;s seamless integration with life outside the institution strikes a stray note of discordance. After six decades behind walls, she wonders at nothing. In an otherwise excellently imagined novel, it8217;s an unexpected flaw.