The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
by Maggie O'Farrell
256pp, Headline Review, £14.99
Maggie O'Farrell's new novel is a short book about a long life and has the dream-like intensity of imagination and the gift of conveying pain, fear and sometimes rapture for which 0'Farrell is known. The prose is spare, yet the Edwardian world it describes crosses two continents and is rich and clear as stained glass. It moves with ease between the mimosa trees of an Indian childhood and the iron-grey seas of Fife in old age. She can make the economical style seem slow, ruminative and rather old-fashioned ("Let us begin with two girls at a dance"), yet except when the host of minor characters occasionally becomes confusing, the story never flags. And it is a story so historically important that one ceases to think of "style" and "the novel" altogether.
For The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is another of the repeating threads in the pattern of recent English fiction inspired by the orphans of the British raj, the children who for several hundred years until the 1930s were separated from their colonial parents at about the age of five to travel "home", often alone, to England in order to escape the deadly diseases of India. The parents and the mimosa trees were not all that the children left behind them. Their native ayahs and other servants had done most of their bringing-up, from the cradle to the gangplank of the mysterious ship that was to take the children into the cold. Many were permanently traumatised; some, like the young Rudyard Kipling, went temporarily mad. And this book is primarily about madness.
There were of course some happy endings. In 1911 Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden, about Mary Lennox, a difficult child whose mother had disliked her. All her family were wiped out by cholera, and she was found alone in an empty house near the body of her ayah. In England she blossoms, cured by love and education. In O'Farrell's book we have Esme Lennox, a difficult child whose mother dislikes her, who is found during a cholera epidemic alone in an empty house beside the body of her ayah and clutching the corpse of her baby brother. It is as if O'Farrell is rewriting the story of The Secret Garden's heroine had she come home to maternal hatred and loneliness and been refused the chance to learn.
Esme becomes odd and apart, and starts having hallucinations. When sent off to balls in Edinburgh to find a husband, she will sprawl in a chair and read a book. Refused education, she becomes "impossible". Then, at one of the loathsome dances, something occurs and she is brought home allegedly drunk. A doctor is called, Esme's perfect elder sister mentions the hallucinations, a signature is procured and Esme is committed to a lunatic asylum where she remains, unvisited and forgotten, for more than 60 years.
Could such a thing have been possible? Yes, it seems that it could. Towards the end of the 20th century, when the old prison-like asylums were being closed down, some elderly patients - they seem usually to have been women - came blinking into the daylight, perfectly sane. O'Farrell has Esme emerge from the twilight, old now but tall and upright, neat and courteous in a "flowery frock". A reluctant great-niece finds herself taking the dignified old woman back to the family home, now made into flats, where Esme, who has complete recall, caresses every familiar door-knob. Soon she asks to see her elder sister, now in a home and suffering from Alzheimer's but perfectly dressed as ever in twinset and brogues: "Please will you leave me alone with my sister."
I will not reveal the outcome. Beneath the cool Edwardian detail of this elegantly written book lie the horrors of a Gothic novel. Scottish propriety conceals rape and murder, torture, hypocrisy and violent sex. The comfort is that the lunacy laws are now reformed and the small, bewildered orphans of the raj are no more.
· Jane Gardam's most recent novel is Old Filth (Abacus).