Hamish Robinson

A cat, a dog and a ghost

Pain and grief seem to lurk behind every object in Moore’s haunting novel, set in the Scottish Borders

issue 02 June 2018

Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well understood — a child is lost — and the viewer, with certain advantages, rides through the unfolding events saddled up on the back of a questing protagonist, in Alison Moore’s Missing, as in her Booker-shortlisted first novel The Lighthouse, the reader is placed in a very different position.

Jesse Noon, a divorced mother approaching 50, is followed round her house in Hawick in the Scottish Borders by a cat and a dog, and the reader follows too. Something is wrong — several things. One morning less than a year earlier, her partner Will, a train driver, upped and left, leaving a message written on a steamed-up mirror. He had hoped for a child that ‘never appeared’.

By default, Jesse has acquired his dog.

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