FICTION: Missing JuliaBy Catherine Dunne Macmillan, 326pp. €9.20
WHY WOULD you choose to leave your life behind and disappear without a trace? What could ever compel you to flee, heartbroken but resolute, from all you hold dear? These are some of the key questions at the core of Catherine Dunne’s intriguing and powerful new novel.
William Harris and Julia Seymour have been together for more than three years. A novelist and a doctor respectively, they have found each other late in life. As they are both 60-plus, theirs is a comforting, easy sort of love, unshackled by the seesawing of adolescent emotions and the uncertainties of youthful infatuation. Not that this is a relationship without deep passion, however – and how refreshing it is to witness the road map of a mature relationship explored in our youth-obsessed culture. Above all, though, William and Julia are a solid partnership: they know what they want and they are sure of each other and their future together.
It is quite a shock, then, when Julia disappears one October morning, and William’s life is thrown into unexpected and devastated disarray. What has happened to make Julia run without explanation or warning? Is she ill? Are there financial worries that William has somehow been unaware of? Has her difficult only daughter, Melissa, driven her away? Thrashing blindly through the abyss left by her absence, he is at a loss. But he soon discovers that Julia’s is no random disappearance: it is a planned, orderly retreat.
As William struggles to understand this cataclysmic event, the reader is made privy to Julia’s story too. We discover, slowly, agonisingly, what has made her feel so off balance, so out of place in her own life that she believes she has no option but to retreat from what she knows and the people she loves. Julia, we learn, is a woman at odds with herself. She is, as William believes her to be, sensitive and sensible, with both feet firmly on the ground, yet she also believes herself to be a sham. How can she be the person she has pretended to be when she has kept perhaps the most significant thing about herself a secret?
Now, with her past rearing its head and threatening to destroy her entire existence, she embarks on a crusade to tie up the loose ends, before fleeing.
She is not being intentionally cruel in choosing to vanish like this, however. In fact, the opposite is true: she is struggling to protect William and her family and friends from a past action, determined not to endanger them by association. And yet it seems she cannot let go completely, leaving behind as she does small, almost indiscernible messages for William. Messages that only he will understand, like a queen out of place on their beloved chess board. Is she somehow hoping that he will follow and find her?
Catherine Dunne’s novels have been praised for their ability to transform the everyday lives of ordinary people into immensely readable fiction and this is certainly true of Missing Julia. This novel is a compulsive page-turner that held me engrossed deep into the night, so eager was I to discover Julia’s dark secret and the reason for her flight. Dunne is a very talented storyteller, and, as the threads of the tale unravelled and the tension built, I found it impossible to resist the urge to race on towards the revelation and climax.
There are darkness and suspense aplenty in Missing Julia, but so too is there raw emotion in all its stark, vulnerable and fragile humanity. With her by now trademark elegant and intelligent prose, Dunne explores whether we can ever really know anyone, especially those we love. What is the complex relationship between secrecy and intimacy that binds us all? Is anything ever what it seems? It's certainly food for thought on these dark nights.
Niamh Greene's novel Rules for a Perfect Lifeis out in Penguin paperback
