Elizabeth is Missing - BBC TV review

As soon as I heard that Glenda Jackson was going to play the lead role in the BBC TV version of Emma Healey's brilliant novel Elizabeth is Missing, I felt sure that it was the most perfect piece of casting. And so it proved. Jackson was fantastic as Maud, the elderly woman with dementia who becomes obsessed about the disappearance of her best friend. She's convinced something bad has happened to Elizabeth, but nobody believes her.

The past becomes intertwined with the present, and the screenplay by Andrea Gibb impressed me, even though some important aspects of Healey's storyline were lost. This was a necessary sacrifice because the TV version ran only for 90 minutes, and on the whole this made a refreshing change from the present day pattern of storylines stretched out interminably beyond their natural length in order to make a six or eight part series (I've seen several of these this year and have mostly not bothered to review them, because the format makes one lose the will to live).

No such danger here. When I reviewed the book here back in March 2017 I talked about the poignancy of the story and this element came over, if anything, even more powerfully in the visual medium. We see Maud's mind slowly disintegrating and the love of her daughter and grand-daughter, although powerless to halt the progress of the disease, remind us of the innate compassion of so many devoted family members struggling to cope with a terrible situation.

The whodunit plot seems, at times, almost incidental, but it isn't really. The outcome of the story is a triumphant vindication of Maud and her persistence, and even if it's inevitable that her memory will continue to deteriorate, it is - as far as it can be - a happy ending. But a realistic one. A television triumph. 

Elizabeth is Missing - book review

Elizabeth is Missing, first published in 2014, was the first novel by Emma Healey. It became a Sunday Times bestseller, and won the Costa First Novel award. The book earned much critical acclaim - not least from the late, great Ruth Rendell. Rendell said, "I've never read anything quite like it", and this was not a double-edged choice of phrase. It really is a terrific novel.

I suppose you'd call it a mainstream work of fiction, but it's also, arguably, a crime novel. It's a story told in the first person by Maud, an elderly woman who is suffering memory loss. Maud lives in her own house, but her forgetfulness is starting to become a real cause of concern to her daughter, who overcomes many frustrations and treats her mother, at least for the vast majority of the time, with a good deal of kindness. But we also see how challenging it can be to cope with a loved one who is ageing in this way. The patience of a saint is sometimes required, and very few of us are saints.

Maud has become concerned that her friend Elizabeth can't be found, but she can't get anyone to take her seriously. As she frets about Elizabeth's absence, her mind goes back to her youth, and the disappearance of her older sister. It seems that people suspected that her sister was murdered, and there is more than one possible culprit, but the mystery was never solved.

When I read this book, I didn't regard it first and foremost as a crime story. It's simply a great piece of writing about a wonderfully realised character and her life. At times I found it almost unbearably poignant. Suffice to say that it's one of the most impressive novels I've read in the past few years. I don't know how Emma Healey is going to surpass it, but I'll be fascinated to read her next book. She has tremendous talent.