At least we presume she has some kind of dementia.  Maud describes herself as “forgetful”.  She sometimes recognises her daughter, Helen, and sometimes doesn’t.  She gets into all kinds of muddles, despite the little notes she leaves herself to remember the important things.  She still wanders off. She still goes to a church but can’t remember her own name when somebody asks it. To have such an unreliable narrator as the protagonist in a whodunit is charming, compassionate and original.

Over the course of the novel Maud’s memory deteriorates in a way that many will recognise. Maud has a friend, Elizabeth, of a similar age.  Elizabeth is missing.  Maud is convinced of that.  She goes to Elizabeth’s house and Elizabeth is no longer there.  She keeps telling people Elizabeth is missing – Helen, the police, Elizabeth’s son – but no one takes her seriously.  Maud is determined to find her.

Novel about dementia

At one level this is a story of someone with dementia who has become fixated on something and keeps repeating it over and over again.  “Elizabeth is missing.”   Towards the end of the novel it becomes apparent that Elizabeth is in hospital and Maud has been told many times where she is and even taken to visit. We feel for Maud who can’t remember this and therefore can’t be assuaged in her anxiety. We feel for Helen in her attempt to stay patient and loving.

But this is not the only tale being told.  Maud’s short term memory is such that if she has a cup of tea she can’t remember to drink it. Her long term memory, however, is lucid.

Novel about missing sister

Seventy years ago, her older sister, Sukey, who was married to Frank and lived nearby went missing. Nobody knew what happened to her.  Her body was never found. Naturally, this was a traumatic experience for the young Maud and events in the old Maud’s life bring back the memories of what happened when the family heard Sukey had gone and set about trying to find her.

Old Maud’s distress that Elizabeth is missing echoes young Maud’s distress that Sukey is missing. A bottle of Macallan whisky by the kerb of the road in the present reminds Maud of a bottle of Macallan whisky being drunk by Frank, all those year ago.

Neat story telling

And so it is that the story of what happened seventy years ago is woven into the tale of what is happening in the present. The reader can guess that the cause of Elizabeth’s disappearance is entirely innocent even if we are not told, until the end, where she is.  The cause of Sukey’s disappearance is another matter.  Was she kidnapped? Did she commit suicide? Was she murdered? And if so, who did it? Was it the dodgy and sometimes violent Frank? Was it Douglas the lodger who evidently knows far more than he is letting on? Was it the terrifying mad woman who hangs about in hedges?

To tell the two tales in this way is a neat literary device, partly because it’s a credible depiction of the mind of someone with dementia – clear about the past and confused by the here and now – but also because it provides some page-turning suspense in the midst of the muddlesome present.

Boring and depressing

I’ll be honest – I found the start of the novel and subsequent narrations by the old Maud hard to read.  I found them boring and depressing.  I found them boring, for the same reason that being with someone with dementia can be boring if you aren’t prepared to enter into a different way of being to be alongside that person. And while I might be prepared to do that for someone I love, it might not be what I would choose to do for my leisure. It can be depressing too, raising all those difficult feelings. What happened to the person she once was?  Why can’t I console her? What if this happens to me?

The clever thing about placing the Sukey-is-missing-tale within the Elizabeth-is-missing-story is that it offers some respite from these feelings that many of us prefer to avoid. Around the middle of the novel, the Sukey story becomes a gripping whodunit that provides enough forward-momentum to more than off-set the lack of action in Maud’s present reality.

At the end the two stories dovetail and the loose ends are tidied up.  Details that appear first as mere fixations are woven into the grand denouement as their significance is explained. The novel is very well crafted, which explains why Elizabeth is Missing won the Costa First Novel Award 2014, why the TV rights have been sold and why it was the subject of a bidding war between nine publishers.

Sympathetically told

As well as the style of narration, I would applaud Emma Healey for the sympathy with which she depicts all her characters. By weaving the story of young Maud within the mind of old Maud, the reader is reminded of the rich, if confusing, world that someone with dementia might be living in. At the end of the novel, Maud, Helen, the long-suffering and sometimes irritable daughter, and even the person we suspect is responsible for Sukey’s disappearance, are all held in loving compassion.

The novel serves to remind us that “Maud” might well wander into our church. We will meet people with dementia at the corner shop, at the bus stop or in the public library if we haven’t already. I hope that through reading Elizabeth is Missing, we might imagine how to honour that person’s reality, even if that reality is different from our own.

• This review first appeared in Third Way magazine

The tale is set in the future. In the world that Michele Guinness creates, The Church of England admits women to the episcopacy in 2014 (I wish). Vicky Burnham-Woods becomes Bishop of Larchester in 2016 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 2020.

Vicky is charismatic, successful in growing churches and deeply committed to bringing the church back into the heart of the community. She is thoroughly committed to defending the poor and not afraid to fight the government on social justice and welfare reform.

Interestingly, the prime minister at the time of Vicky’s appointment is a gay man but Vicky, despite being radical as far a social justice is concerned, is conservative around marriage and not sympathetic to clergy wanting to conduct gay marriages. This wins her some enemies. She has enemies in other places too.

As the novel unfurls, it becomes clear that somebody is trying to undo her.   Press photographers have an uncanny knack of knowing exactly where she is, even in her most private moments. Tit bits of her past are leaked to the press in an attempt to undermine her.

Who is it that is doing this? Is it one of her friends? Is it a member of her staff? Are they working with the prime minister? Or with those bishops who were utterly opposed to her appointment on the grounds of her sex?

It’s a great story – or at least it should be.

The problem with Archbishop is that it isn’t the page-turner that it could have been. I confess to having found it grindingly slow – all 543 pages of it. It’s very well researched but it isn’t well enough written. The characterisation is poor, the dialogue unbelievable and the story-telling somewhat cumbersome.

Let’s start with the research. Guinness clearly knows and understands the Anglican church. The historical references are accurate, the way in which the media behaves is convincing and the window into the NHS (Vicky’s husband, Tom, is a surgeon) is well portrayed.

I would love to say the skulduggery she describes could never happen amongst a community of Christians – but alas I know better. There are many of us who are very familiar with that being nice to your face whist stabbing you in the back. Guinness gets the Church of England and portrays it very well.

Indeed, one of the features of the novel that hindered my enjoyment was the very accuracy with which the church was portrayed. It was so depressing. Who would want to spend their leisure time filling their head with the machinations of the Anglican church? Not me.

So full marks to Guinness on research. Few could have done it better.

Unimpressive characterisation

The characterisation is less impressive. It would be unfair to say that Vicky is a caricature – she is far more than that – but the way she is depicted is a little “thin” nonetheless. I would have hoped that an Archbishop of Canterbury would have had a richer and deeper inner life than Vicky appears to have. In the very last scene, Vicky and Tom whisper their marriage vows to each other before falling asleep. Vicky seems too twee, too emotionally immature, to have reached the highest ecclesiastical office. I never quite believed in her enough to care greatly about what happened.

Which brings me to the story-telling. The narrative is developed through back-story. The novel starts in 2019 with the Crown Nominations Commission discussing who to put forward for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. From there, there is a flipping to and fro between what is happening in the present and the events of the past, helpfully indicated with subheadings: February 2020, 2006, 2020, 1983 and so on.

I didn’t find this confusing – but for those who do, there is a chronology in the form of Vicky’s CV at the back (don’t wait until you get to the end to find it) – but I did find it tedious. I reached the point where I just wanted to skip the back-story and wished Guinness had done the same.

Covering too many bases

I think Guinness is attempting to cover too many bases in this novel. There is nothing wrong with a slow story – nothing at all. If a novel has got beautifully portrayed characters that seem more real than your own flesh and blood, it doesn’t if they don’t get anywhere very fast.

Guinness starts many of the chapters with a quote from the German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, who is Vicky’s seminal theologian. A different kind of novel, would be one in which the theology of Moltmann is integrated into the tale, making it into a fiction that illuminates theology and vice versa. Again, if a novel like that was done sufficiently well, the speed at which the story unravels would not important.

But I don’t think Guinness is displaying the skills, in this text, to write a novel that can afford to be slow. She is probably a very good writer of non-fiction but a mediocre writer of novels. (It’s the weakness of the dialogue gives that brings me to that conclusion.) In which case, she needs to keep the reader interested by spinning a great yarn. And she could do that. The plot is great. If she had just made a decision to tell the story twice as fast, I might have enjoyed it.

• This review first appeared in Third Way magazine.