A novel like this needs to convince us with its 'authenticity'. I haven't heard the phrase 'beer-off', meaning 'off licence' in Nottingham and the East Midlands, for several decades and certainly not from anyone outside my family, but that and the 'me ducks' and suchlike are good. I take it that Adam Thorpe knows Lincolnshire. I'm less prepared to believe the badly-spelt graffiti authored by those characters who didn't benefit from his Magdalen education. I'm not saying they'd have got it right but they wouldn't have got it wrong like he tells us they did.At halfway, I wasn't convinced either way, with its chapters focussing on a variety of characters, all with some connection to the girl advertised as missing on the posters. Like an episode of Midsomer Murders, you realize there is good reason to suspect they know something or 'did it' but also know it can't be all of them. One is as ready to expect a red herring as our old Latin teacher was as he recognized a question designed to distract him from his exegesis of the ablative absolute onto some more arcane and less demanding issue that might occupy him until the bell sounded.
There is the secondhand bookshop proprietor with more than is healthy residing in his beard, fixated more than he should be on the Romanian careworker; the children's clothes shop owner whose middle-aged self-esteem needs the attention of younger men to sustain it, I really saw little wrong with her until Thorpe showed us what those with the shop units nearby thought of her. And you can't be expected to take to Ken, the busker and failed session man, except that he is so heavily flagged up as a prime suspect that no Midsomer watcher would ever think it was him.
That is until Chapter 10, Chris, about the fretful monk in the abbey. he has something on his mind and the posters aren't helping. A beautiful and captivating chapter - and who am I to comment on the authenticity of Thorpe's portrayal of monastic life even though I do know a monk - and then it's time to accept that this is a very fine novel indeed.
Set in 2012 in Lincolnshire, the heartland of the Leave vote, the Romanian girl is a relevant contemporary reference in a downbeat novel, haunted by themes of our difficult times and Thorpe is a tremendous observer of social detail. But on a more literary level, the climax of the book is an episode involving Chris, the monk, by a lake and one wonders, and I think we are meant to wonder subliminally, about there is a willow grows aslant a brook and Gertrude's report on the drowning of Ophelia. If it's there enough for me to notice it, it's there.
Of course I can't tell you what happened to Fay here but the ending is to be admired not only because, in a way, it ends like my own paltry, completely unworthy of comaprison, novel ends. And you haven't read that, either, have you.
It may not be quite Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday or Julian Barnes' Sense of an Ending but it isn't far away. This is what it is like now. I don't know how many of us dare say if the future will be any better.
