On seeming and being: the unreliable narrator in Elizabeth Ismissing by Emma Healey

ago. The image of blur between sky and sea [Healey 2015: 271] at the end of the book is a wonderful metaphor of the impression the novel produces, something obscure, magnificent and disturbing at the same time.

Maud, an eighty-two-year old woman with serious problems with her memory at the period when the story is told, is a classical first-person unreliable narrator, and her unreliability is directly manifested from the very beginning:

‘Maud? Was I boring you so much that you’d rather stand outside in the dark? ’ A woman calls to me from the warmth light of a cluttered dining room<...> [Healey 2015: 1].

At first, we presume that ‘a woman’ is some stranger to the narrator, but already at the next page she remembers her and addresses as Elizabeth. The woman’s memory cannot be trusted, and the reader is made aware of that from the very beginning. The trick is that the very notion of reliability is questioned in the book, and eventually Maud manages to discover the reality buried about seventy years before - the body of her disappeared sister Sukey. Maud used to be quite an observant and smart girl, eager to unveil the mystery of Sukey’s sudden disappearance, but she failed to do it while being still young. Why? Maybe she was preoccupied with too many other concerns and blind due to passionate nature of youth. Later her memory, though so often absolutely blank, manages to fit the puzzle, though Maud herself was convinced that all her investigation was about her friend Elizabeth’s absence from home. At the same time, the narrator does not conceal or purposefully misrepresent any facts, revealing them as they flash in her memory.

If we turn to classifications of unreliable character (the one used by William Riggan), Maud is definitely not The Madman and has nothing to do with The Liar. The type closest to her attitudes and narration is The Naif, as her perception and memory are limited due to her condition.

Maud may also be characterised more specifically as a selective narrator, though her selectiveness is not intentional, as, for example, the one of Masuji Ono from An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo

Ishiguro. Maud’s past actions caused no obvious harm to anybody and she has no need to conceal facts, but her memory is selective and unpredictable, revealing a new bit of the puzzle every now and then. Maud is helpless in controlling her memories, but she does her best to keep them through making notes, which also may be misleading and confusing as it is not always obvious which note comes next and the dates are not always stated. Maud is selective and unreliable against her will. She would love to reveal the exhaustive information about the events, but she cannot do it. Or, maybe, after all it is a false assumption, and Maud has something she would like to keep a secret? Probably we face an example of exclusion of certain events as a protective memory function? We have no other witnesses of the events at the time when the story is told, as some of them are dead and others far away, so there is nobody to verily or contradict the information Maud remembers or truly believes to remember. We do not know much about her life between the tragic events and the time when she is eighty two and has difficulties with reconstruction of the most recent events. We know that she got married and gave birth to two children, but that is all. She might have known some truth and, who knows, might have told Helen some details, but there is no way to know it for sure. Helen may keep silence not to disturb her mother, or maybe there is nothing to keep silence about. The further we read the more questions and doubts we face.

In the result, upon reading a significant part of the book the surprised reader finds out that he has been fooled by Maud, constantly reporting her friend Elizabeth missing, as her daughter Helen told her many times that Elizabeth was at hospital, and they even visited her together. On the one hand, Maud intends to be exact in reporting facts and often repeats what she considers the truth; on the other hand, the reader cannot rely on the information provided as it may at odds with the novel’s reality. Why has Maud discovered the body so many years after the events? If all the clues were known to her before, why was Sukey’s body lost for about seventy years? Wasn’t it because Maud knew something but realized that the truth should be concealed while her brain was working properly? No direct answers are given in the text.

Another question the reader is made to dwell upon is how reliable other, normal characters are. Can we really trust Douglas and his evidences, or Maud’s father who was so prejudiced against Frank, or Carla, getting her news from gossips and TV reports and using suppositions to report it ( ‘You know there was an old woman mugged around here? <...> Well, actually, it was Weymouth, but it could have been here’ [Healey 2015:3]), or even Maud’s mother, whose main concern was to sustain the family in the hardships of post-war time?

The book is full of wrong identities, people mistaken for somebody else and people who finally turned out to be someone different and unexpected. Nobody suspected the mad woman to be Douglas’s mother, Maud was often taken for her missing sister due to physical resemblance and Sukey’s clothes she started wearing, elderly Maud constantly confuses her daughter Helen and her granddaughter Katy. At the end of the novel the reader is free to interpret some moments and we still cannot be one hundred percent sure who the murderer was, or even if it was Sukey’s body, because the police was to verily the stories and to ‘ascertain the age of the remains found’ [Healey 2015: 269]. Douglas did not tell lies about his mother’s identity, he just never mentioned this fact. After all, nobody asked him. Still the reader has a sound reason not to trust Doug in his other statements.

Not only thoughts and statements of the narrator hint at her unreliability. The daily routine is also suggestive. Maud is really food-centered at times. One of the direct reasons of her nearly obsessive attitude to food is her forgetfulness. The second - the traumatic experience of the war and the years to follow. The scene from the past where they all gather and eat berries in a sort of dreaming condition is really powerful. Why is it described in such detail? Is there a specific message? There definitely should be, and it is up to the reader to interpret it. The episode follows the sleepless night after the mad woman’s death and Douglas’s confession that she was his mother.

We stripped the branches, greedy and quick, the berries collapsing between our fingers. As we picked we filled our mouths, silently, intense and certain. I kept going until I could hardly lift my arms and the skin of my fingers was flecked from the tiny cuts from the blackberry thorns [Healey 2015: 256].

We none of us laughed, but gazed at each other as if we’d just woken from a dream, our clothes stained, our skin pale, our eyes watering [Healey 2015: 256].

What has each of them seen in that delirious dream? The reader can only guess, as the characters involved seem unlikely to help us.

Earlier in the book and much later in Maud’s lifespan there is another parallel between blackberry juice and pain, when being old and feeble she falls down some steps on her way home from Elizabeth’s place and feels bruises spreading under her skin

<... > staining me like blackberry juice [Healey 2015: 26].

Only later the origin of this simile will become clear, when we read the quoted episode.

Maud’s present day relations with food also serve to emphasise her unreliability, as it may be strange to expect exactness and fidelity to the facts from the person who forgets cups full of tea and needs a note ‘Don’t eat’ to be attached in the kitchen not to have a dozen of snacks, because she can’t remember that she has already eaten several times.

At the end of the book, she sees a lot of food at Elizabeth’s funeral. The terrible thing is that Maud has not slightest idea what to do with those dishes:

The filled breads, the stuffed-and-buttered breads, are cut into squares, and my stomach growls, but I can’t work out what I’m to do with them. I watch a man take one and bite into it, his fingers crushing, his lips sloppy. I feel queasy, but copy him all the same, cramming the thing into my own mouth <...> [Healey 2015: 274].

She already had similar problems in the church, where she put biscuits into her tea instead of sugar. The final remnants of the reality and her connections to it slip away from the narrator, as some basic and rather instinctive actions become unknown and puzzling. We realise that she is not to reveal much more, as the final door to the depths of her memory shuts. Once she noticed after having forgotten something obvious (where to put cutlery while laying the table):

A little piece of me is gone [Healey 2015: 61].

New and new pieces keep going up to the moment at the end of the novel when Maud herself seems missing.

Despite the disturbing condition Maud is described in, she is not depicted as somebody deserving only pity. Quite the opposite. She is stubborn, strong-willed, really determined and possesses her own ideas and attitudes which helps the reader acknowledge her personality. Some phrases and observations make us smile despite the serious issues tackled in the book. Maud confuses events and people, but it does not turn her into some miserable creature, thus it is possible for the reader to smile and even to laugh while reading. At the remarkable scene of Elizabeth’s funeral (where the disease protects Maud from realising the sad reason for the event) she feels pity that the guests have already gone:

‘Oh. Have they gone already? I wasn’t there to catch the bouquet. ’

Her daughter is also amused (as any reader will pardonably be), although she realises that smiling may be considered inappropriate under the circumstances:

‘Mum, it’s a funeral. They don’t throw bouquets at funerals. ’

She smiles and then covers her mouth with her hand, looking back into the house [Healey 2015: 274].

There are lines in A Commentary by Karen Hewitt to The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, which may be easily referred to Elizabeth Is Missing".

This is a novel full of distressing and painful scenes. Sometimes we are tense with worry. But unless you can also feel the humour in the novel, especially in the conversations, you are missing something which makes it a novel full of life, and even light [Hewitt 2010: 22].

The immediate parallel, which comes to mind and is directly given in the text of the novel, may be the most famous unreliable narrator in British literature - Alice in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This association alongside the humour help to deal with the sense of frustration, which the main character’s helplessness and disorientation may cause. It is essential to preserve the sense of humour even when the absurdity of daily routine becomes overwhelming.

The first reference to Alice is made when Maud remembers her visit to the hotel, where Sukey’s suitcase had been discovered by the police:

Inside, the hotel seemed to be just one long staircase, winding round and round <...>. From the bottom it looked like a well, like the rabbit whole in Alice in Wonderland. I thought Sukey could easily have fallen down it and never found her way back [Healey 2015: 169].

If we read the book again we are likely to find a peculiar reference to this sensation made by elderly Maud, who uses this image probably without realising that she speaks to her younger self:

At least I have finally fallen [Healey 2015: 26], she thinks with some kind of relief and satisfaction, sitting on the sharp steps digging into her back. Here is the allusion to this imaginary fall of Sukey and the one Maud herself was so close to in the hotel, when drunk Frank tried to take Sukey’s letter to Douglas from her pocket. The whole book is covered by such subtle net of links, parallels and allusions, as if to compensate for the narrator’s unreliability. For example, tins of peach slices, which Maud buys daily and seems a kind of obsessed with, originate from those mysterious days seventy years before, when, being chased by the mad woman, she drops a tin of peaches in panic [Healey 2015: 27]. Making her buy new and new tins the author additionally draws our attention to the episode, demonstrating how meaningful it was for Maud.

Through the reference to Alice in Wonderland Sukey’s disappearance turns into something unreal as if it were just a dream (or rather a nightmare). However, if Alice woke up at the end of the story, there is no such possibility for Maud’s sister, though at this stage we still hope that she might suddenly turn up safe and sound. It seems significant that reflecting on the past Maud remembers tiny details and the title of the book is vivid in her mind. Another reference to the famous stories is given when we see Maud in her daughter’s house, where she moved without remembering and fully realizing the fact:

She [Katy] takes her arm back and moves away and I follow her into the corridor, but in an instant I find I’m lost: everything is unfamiliar. I feel as though I’ve gone through the mirror in that story - what’s it called? I look at my notes and find one with directions to THE KITCHEN. I follow them. Perhaps there ’ll be a little bottle or a cake with an EAT ME label. Ifind Helen instead [ Healey 2015: 198].

In the given abstract it is impossible to be certain whether she is serious about the bottle and the cake or just mocking at herself and playing tricks at the reader, but we immediately notice that she cannot remember the book’s title. Or can she? Probably we can trust her here, as she seems to lose even such tiny connections with reality as the books everybody knows from childhood.

A miniature bottle lies against the kerb. What’s that story about a little bottle? ‘Drink me, ’ it said. I can’t remember the rest [Healey 2015: 199].

The blur becomes more and more intense.

Another puzzle we shall never find a clue to is Maud’s agreement to move the house. When she decides she does not want to live with her daughter while packing up her possessions, she learns the facts, which she finds really shocking and disturbing:

‘Well, there’s no choice now. The house is sold. ’

For a moment I can’t make sense of the words. It seems an impossible sentence. ‘You’ve sold my house?’ I say, feeling sick. <...> ‘Oh Mum, you agreed months ago [Healey 2015: 182].

We have nobody to verily Helen’s words or to prove them false. Maud’s reaction pushes us to the idea that the decision might have been made by Helen and Tom without asking their mother’s opinion. Of course, they meant to help their disoriented mother, as it was becoming really dangerous for Maud to stay on her own, but here Helen acts and another unreliable narrator, making the world of the novel even more dim and unstable.

Things start even changing size, though not as literally as in Alice in Wonderland, as in case with the room in hospital, where Maud and Helen come to see Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s son Peter starts accusing Maud of his mother’s stroke, as evidently she had involved the woman in the digging in the garden (where Sukey’s body was later discovered), and Helen asks him to go out and have a conversation not in Maud’s presence (another hint at how protective Helen may be).

The room seems small now that it’s just me, and the walls don’t look quite right; they move with the breeze and I have a feeling of being on a boat. A tissue stick up from its box like a sail <...> [Healey 2015:254].

Things change their substance and seem to be something different, as it often happens to Alice.

There are numerous signals of unreliable narration in the text of the novel. They are mainly intratextual elements signifying the narrator’s doubts, uncertainties and gaps in memory, as there are no logical mistakes or something contradicting common sense and general knowledge about the world and history. The author extensively uses such words as "seem’ or ‘look’ or ‘couldhave been’, giving us no solid ground to walk upon.

Sometimes characters, and not only Maud, prove their unreliability through unfinished phrases, as it happens with Frank after the death of Douglas’s mother, known throughout the novel as the mad woman. We do not expect Frank to know the truth as nobody confesses having told it to him. Despite that he even ‘seemed close to tears ’ being told about the accident, and we can only wonder why his reaction was so personal. Douglas is ready to reveal the truth to Frank, but Maud’s mother interrupts him:

‘Never mind about that, ’ Ma said, wiping at the blackberry juice on his chin and silencing him [Healey 2015: 257].

The next words pronounced by Frank make us shudder:

‘I remember the first time I saw her, ’ Frank said, and there was a pause, during which I think we must all have been wondering what he would say next. But he didn ’t finish... [Healey 2015: 256].

So he did know the truth about Douglas’s mother? Was it Sukey who told him? How many secrets and mysteries are there in the novel thoroughly disguised from the readers?

Even the order in which the events are presented to the reader may be questioned. The last pages are dedicated to Elizabeth’s funeral, but was it really the final event chronologically? When Maud forgets that she doesn’t work there any longer and arrives at Oxfam, she finds Elizabeth’s frame among the stuff for sale, and the discovery of the photo from this frame convinces her that she is right [91]. Why did Elizabeth’s son bring her possessions into the charity shop if she is still alive? Even if her condition was so poor, couldn’t he wait until everything was over? However, there may be several possibilities: either Elizabeth was already dead (and Maud also has such suspicions after her discovery [p. 93]) or her son was a real rascal, which Maud numerously hints at. Earlier in the church where Elizabeth used to go people behaved strangely and some phrases dropped by them make us doubt that Elizabeth was still alive:

‘So, naturally, her son rang me. I told him we ’d pray for her... ’ [Healey 2015: 72].

The conversations in the church are full of insinuations rather than direct reporting of the facts.

Maud often forgets to date her notes, so we cannot know for sure how the events should be arranged in the puzzle of this story. The account of the narrated events is probably distorted.

Emma Healey refers to the unreliable narrator (or even several narrators) not just to make the story poignant, intriguing and original, but also to encourage the readers to participate in storytelling and to read between the lines. At the same time, the author becomes indistinguishable in the narration. It is necessary to be an attentive and observant reader to follow the story and not to be lost and confused in these memory games. This is definitely one of the books requiring second reading, upon which some new details may become evident and suggestive. And maybe the best way to unravel the tangle of hints and puzzles is to follow Maud’s example - to make notes. Despite being an unreliable narrator, Maud reveals a lot to an observant reader.