To make the most of Sarah Moss’s latest novel, it’s worth flicking back to its origins in her 2011 tale of contemporary motherhood, Night Waking. There, Moss intercuts the story of historian Anna, who accompanies her husband on a long work trip to a Scottish island and finds herself floundering in drowning in childcare, with a series of letters from the 19th century, written by a young midwife dispatched to the island to offer her services to the locals. The details of May Moberley’s brief life (she died at sea on her journey home) are only lightly sketched, but Moss used her next novel to flesh them out. Bodies of Light jumps back in time again to 1850s Manchester, where May and her sister Ally live with their artist father and a mother whose work among the city’s underclass leaves her little time or tenderness for her own children. It is Ally on whom Moss concentrates here, describing her struggles to shake off her mother’s oppressive morality and qualify as one of the country’s first female doctors. In the final pages, we see her marrying a lighthouse engineer and escaping with him to Cornwall. “She is happy,” the book concludes. “She looks forward to tomorrow.”
In Signs for Lost Children, tomorrow has arrived. The book picks up precisely where Bodies of Light breaks off, and the fact that Moss chose to return to Ally’s story signals that we should abandon any hopes of a straightforward happy ever after. Still, the opening pages paint a promising picture. Ally and her husband Tom are embarking on married life in a white cottage with “red roses at the gate”; a situation so idyllic it borders on caricature. Idylls, though, are made to be broken; sure enough, the honeymoon is brief. In the space of four chapters, Tom has set sail to build lighthouses in Japan, while Ally has taken up a post at Truro Asylum. Tom tries to comfort her by reminding her that “letters take only a few weeks now”, but the pair have known one another for barely longer than that; it’s a precarious situation from which to weather a six-month rift.
What follows is a quietly devastating portrait of the way identity crumbles when you’ve nothing, or no one, to pin it to; a novel-length investigation of the idea that a man (or woman) is whatever room he is in. While Ally and Tom both kicked against Victorian England’s rigid social structures, they have nevertheless spent their lives buttressed by them; marriage may have looked like an escape, but in reality it was just a sideways step into another culturally endorsed framework. Their separation leaves them both truly unfettered for the first time in their lives: Tom through geography; Ally via her independent status as a married, professional woman. Both are inexorably drawn into separate but parallel explorations of who they really are – and, inevitably, each finds their sense of their marriage beginning to unravel.
These lateral portraits of disillusionment are excellently rendered, but where the book falls short is in the imbalance between their two storylines. Tom’s journey is external and exotic: a passage through Japan in which he becomes aware, then enamoured, of the possibility of another way of living. This is beautifully delivered (Moss is an effortlessly elegant writer), but in the end it is Ally’s internal odyssey that grips and it is hard not to experience Tom’s chapters as a distraction from the real story. Having watched Ally endure teenage bouts of “hysteria” and its “treatments” (slaps, dousings, blistering) in Bodies of Light, we appreciate the complexity of her decision to enter an asylum, and, sure enough, it triggers a psychological crisis. She is brought up hard against the realisation that sanity is relative, and that women in Victorian England may have good reason for exhibiting the sort of behaviour that saw them locked away: as a female doctor, after all, she herself is “an unnatural, undomesticated being, very probably subject to mental instability”. Watching her recognise, rail against and ultimately synthesise such a personal dialectic makes for a compelling, often harrowing, occasionally heartbreaking read.
Does the novel work as a standalone piece? Not quite. Reading it without a knowledge of Ally’s backstory would inevitably diminish its richness – not to mention raise the question of why it is that Ally has such an extensive backstory while Tom doesn’t appear tohave one at all. The better question, though, is whether that matters. It seems to me, with this book, that it’s no longer sufficient to call what Moss is doing “novel-writing”. Taken together, these three books (along with her memoir of a year spent in Iceland, Names for the Sea) constitute an ongoing interrogation of the role of women within the family, and in the wider world, and it’s a broader, knottier enterprise than the word “novel” allows. A project, perhaps you could call it, of the lifelong variety. An undertaking.
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