Book Review: The Missing - Andrew O'Hagan (Faber, 1995)

Book One - The Candlewick.

The thing that struck me about this book – from over 10 ft away, over-looking me from a skyscraper top shelf in the Fiction section of WH Smith – was the book’s title and its front cover photograph.

The Missing. The word conjures up images and thoughts – what or who is missing? I liked the front page (Getty) photograph, too; a black and white, documentary photo of an urban, typically barren council estate scene in Anonymous Britain, circa 1980.

The photo showed something so totally distressing as to be equally unnerving – unlike the little girl in red, lost amongst the chaos of the Warsaw Ghetto in Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1995, also), this photo featured an empty children’s playground, overlooked by blocky, inhuman towers, and an unoccupied red children’s swing. Just still in the desolation, a mirror image of the lost girl in the ghetto. Never has a front page summed up so perfectly what a book’s contents are about.

I grabbed the book and looked at some of the critics’ reviews. Tim Adam (of Elle) compares the author – one I’d never before heard of – to my literary hero, George Orwell, and in particular his brilliant Down and Out in Paris and London. That’ll do nicely; purchase made.

The Missing is a story of dislocation, hope, alienation, loss, terror and urban chaos. It is about an urban underclass in Glasgow, initially, but then moves on to the New Town and London. That’s all in a remarkable first section, entitled Book One – The Candlewick.

O’Hagan – born just one year after me – discusses his ordinary yet happy childhood, accompanied by TV programmes that I’ve mentioned to many people my age but who no-one has ever heard of, namely Mary, Mungo and Midge. That was a brilliant animated series about a girl, a mouse and a dog, who all work in harmony (the mouse sitting on the dog’s nose, leashed to the girl). This cartoon is also set in a Tower Block, one of the main themes or motifs of this brilliant book.

There is a definite ‘living in the sky’ theme throughout the book, nowhere better en-concreted than than great city of Glasgow, which I visited last year, and which has seemingly hundreds of tower blocks, as you enter the city centre via the motorway (another little motif).

There is the constant description of new housing estates and the danger of the Missing being lost forever under these new boxes. It’s all leading to somewhere, this book, and I think I know where, though that will have to wait until I cover Book Two, some other day.