Adam Thorpe’s previous novel, Flight (2012), was a globe-trotting comic thriller about a cuckolded middle-aged pilot caught up in gun-running; before that, he published Hodd (2009), a metatextual reworking of the Robin Hood myth. You can never be sure what he’ll do next, which might explain why he still doesn’t have the name recognition he deserves. In 1992, the year of his debut, Ulverton, he was apparently an “obvious choice” for Granta’s best of young British novelists, according to AS Byatt, one of the judges; so obvious, she later said, that she actually didn’t nominate him, assuming others would; they didn’t.
His new novel is a vibrant ensemble piece unfolding around the disappearance of a teenage girl, Fay, from a Lincolnshire council estate. Jon McGregor’s recent Reservoir 13 also uses a missing teenage girl as a pretext for portraying the life of a small English community. Thorpe’s setting is urban, McGregor’s rural, but the bigger difference is that the all-seeing narration of Reservoir 13, austerely above the fray, pays as much heed to the passing of the seasons as to the villagers for whom life plods on. Missing Fay, by contrast, inhabits each of its characters one chapter at a time – a more traditional but arguably more vivid approach that affords a steady pulse of dramatic irony as well as a measure of suspense, not least because Thorpe’s carousel of perspectives includes that of Fay herself.
We start in the company of David, an ecologist on a camping trip with his family, regretfully ogling younger women and sermonising about palm oil as his children eat Magnums. From this enjoyable if well-trodden terrain, the novel moves progressively into less stereotypical territory, putting us variously in the shoes of a former steelworker who survived the Kindertransport, a Romanian care assistant and – most memorable of all – Sheena, the glamorous middle-aged manager of a children’s clothes shop, sating her unfulfilled yearning for the shoeseller next door with Gavin, a chilly goth who deputy manages a local supermarket.
To some of the novel’s characters, Fay is just a face on a poster; others know her as a sharp-tongued shoplifter. Only Sheena, to whom Fay’s school sends her on work experience, gets halfway close to the troubled girl whose ability to stand up for herself is tested by a quietly menacing stepfather. (When Sheena says she’ll give her “half an hour off”, Fay shoots back: “Off what? You’re not paying me”.)
Thorpe’s multi-voiced narration, in the third person but always inside his characters’ heads, enables some gentle sending-up, not least in a penultimate section featuring a TV producer curing his burnout with a spell off-grid in a monastery. But the parts that really sing involve characters who you suspect engage Thorpe’s imaginative sympathy most fully, like Cosmina – a victim of workplace racism – or Sheena, whose story is a captivating vignette of loneliness and desire.
It’s only on rereading that you can see how the random-seeming structure is seeded with symmetries and slow-burn detail: a scene involving Cosmina’s fat, lazy and bigoted colleague has the air of liberal reverse prejudice but plays a little differently when you notice some graffiti in an earlier passage.
The tactical omission of Gavin’s increasingly vampiric perspective adds a teasing hint of occult drama. “Some maniac with uncontrollable urges. Or maybe she has just run away,” someone thinks early on, seeing Fay’s image on a poster appealing for information about her disappearance. This rich novel of loose ends never leaves us in doubt that the two possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive.
• Missing Fay by Adam Thorpe is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
