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.

Yeovil Junction

On Saturday, 1 April, I set off for St David's Station, the main train station for Exeter, undecided about what to do for the day.

It's Saturday, I have £50 in my wallet, and I have the day off. It's a sunny and mild early Spring day; beautiful. One of those days where the weather system throws a few giant cotton buds just to liven up a pure blue sky.

Shall I catch the X53 Jurassic Coast bus to Weymouth, or get the train to Yeovil Junction and then walk to Yeovil Pen Mill for a lovely extra little rural train ride down to Weymouth. Maiden Newton, the Stone Age chalk figure on the green hillside, Yetminster, Upwey and the great Regency town itself, Weymouth.

In the end, I cast aside all financial considerations and jump on the 12.10 Saturday service to Waterloo, London. I head off up the line on the turbo diesel - a good 80 or 90 mph - and pay 13.90 for a Cheap Day Return. Stopping at every station along the way except the miniature St James Halt: Pinhoe, Whimple, Feniton, Honiton, Axminster Crewkern, and, finally, Yeovil Junction, right in the middle of nowhere.

Only after a 10 minute halt at the passing loop that now is Chard Junction, my very own ancestral home. This means a glimpse of the River Axe and a tiny footbridge and weir, the one we used to visit thirty years ago. I can picture myself there now, 9 years old, home-made string and jam jar improvised fishing device, no fish. Only Barry could catch a trout on demand.

At Yeovil Junction, there are a number of foreigners, Eastern Europeans, all wondering how to get into the town centre, about 1 and a half miles away. They probably work in factories in town, perhaps Westlands, or maybe the famous Portuguese factories in Chard, several hundred just 15 miles down the road.

I used to think that Yeovil Junction was the station where Ian Carmichael got off when he went to visit, by train, Alistair Sims's School of Lifemanship in Yeovil. But, no, it must've been either the old Town station or perhaps Pen Mill station.

I walk along Newton Road into town, about a 20 minute walk, past some delightful green rural scenery, and Newton House. Plus a Ham stone, sandstone agricultural building.

The town is brilliant, a typical market town, yet big and high-tech even during World War One when it hosted one of the country's first ever aircraft manufacturers.

A visit to Ottakars bookstore; Ladbrokes to waste #7 on gambling, and, unusually for me, a Pepsi and ice in the Wetherspoons.

I stroll down to Pen Mill just to take a look, but it is already too late to get the train to Weymouth.

Back home to Exeter, arriving at 8.00pm along with a number of youths from Honiton out on the town in Exeter.