The Missing World: A Novel [Paperback]

Margot Livesey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2006

What if--by a stroke of fortune--you could start afresh, could wipe away that catastrophic blunder in your past? And to what lengths would you go to establish that in fact you'd done nothing wrong at all? After an accident robs Hazel of three years' worth of memory, just such an opportunity is granted to her ex-boyfriend Jonathan. What follows is a brilliant inverted love story: one man's desperate attempts to realize and rationalize a lie, and a woman's harrowing attempts to recognize the truth.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Margot Livesey is an artist of alluring unease. Enter London through her looking glass, if you dare; once you do, it's doubtful you'll want to emerge. In her ruthlessly funny third novel, The Missing World, a modern Rapunzel is imprisoned in a none-too-tall Highbury house after losing much of her memory in an accident. Hazel's captor? The beekeeping insurance adjuster with whom she used to live. Jonathan is now determined to restore their relationship, even if he has to embalm it in lies: "Why am I doing this? he wondered, sitting on the edge of the bed. The answer perfumed the air, sweet as violets: because I can." Hazel's rescuers? Freddie, a black American roofer who would give anything "for a decent, ordinary phobia," and Charlotte, a rackety actress who's been on a sponging odyssey around London ever since her boyfriend left her and became a success: "Charlotte had perfected a look of keen interest when people insisted on telling her how well he was doing." And then there's Maud, who has her own reasons for keeping her best friend, Hazel, in the dark, and Mr. Early, an entirely bald designer of mannequin heads.

How these wildly different individuals converge is only one of The Missing World's many exhilarations. Livesey slowly, tantalizingly has her characters reveal themselves as they bump up against reality. She also has an eye--and a perfect ear--for evasions and illusion. Jonathan is particularly adept at turning wish fulfillment into an extreme sport, convincing himself that subterfuge is the only way to go:

He wanted Hazel better, of course, but wasn't that like desiring his own banishment? What he really wanted was for her to recover not merely from the accident but from the delusions that had carried her away from him.

Energy, as Blake puts it, is eternal delight, and with its plethora of farcical entrances and exits, The Missing World has energy to burn. Yet just as often Livesey conquers by oddball understatement. Emerging from her coma, Hazel "opened her eyes and gazed up at the four of them. The colour of her irises had deepened, as if the long twilight of the last week had taken up permanent residence in her brain." With her predilection for the narrative ambush, Livesey has been likened to P.D. James and Patricia Highsmith--but she may even exceed these grandes dames in this brilliant exploration of where devotion ends and danger begins. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When Hazel Ransome, a freelance journalist, is hit by a car and loses her memory of the past three years, her ex-lover Jonathan seizes the opportunity to gain a second chance with her. As Hazel convalesces in the London home they shared for four years, Jonathan, an insurance claims adjuster and bee-keeper, tries desperately to keep her from discovering the mistake he made that caused her to leave him the previous year. When her best friend, Maud, fails to help her piece together the events of her recent past, Hazel finds unlikely allies in two fellow Londoners who are struggling to keep their own too-vivid memories from overwhelming them. Livesey (Criminals), a native of Scotland, spins a suspenseful tale full of bright, believable characters. Recommended for all fiction collections.
-Jane la Plante, Minot State Univ. Lib., ND
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Picador (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312424701
• ISBN-13: 978-0312424701
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #545,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Far from harmless, February 26, 2000

By 

Ian A. MacDonald - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Missing World (Hardcover)

What a strange piece of luck a snowy night in north London is for Jonathan, the deeply obsessive lover in Margot Livesey's "The Missing World." A car skids and knocks down Hazel, his estranged girlfriend. He finds her almost comatose and rushes her to hospital. Lo and behold, by the time she regains consciousness, days later, she has completely forgotten how utterly she loathed the man-and the good reasons she had for her loathing. "A new beginning." he thinks and whisks her back home again. Hazel continues to suffer debilitating seizures and Jonathan envelops her in suffocating solicitude. She is grateful, but the reader knows she's in for a rough passage.

So begins a keenly heard, beautifully crafted, but ultimately very odd novel. Livesey has been compared to Patricia Highsmith, but to me, the better match would be Jane Smiley. The story unfolds with such frank and cheery ordinariness and stays always within bounds of trendy, but entirely plausible behavior. Yet surreal and menacing strains appear almost at once. In a common suspense novel, guns might be drawn to create drama or characters might be threatened by tough-guy hoodlums. In "The Missing World," Charlotte, an out-of-work actress, finds herself abruptly chucked onto the street by a fickle sister. To Livesey's enduring credit, being homeless in winter London is made every bit as frightening as a set of brass knuckles.

But the central vulnerability continues to be beautiful Hazel. Turn by turn, we follow two characters who become drawn into her needy arc. Freddie the roofer finds himself newly energized by a desire to save her. Charlotte is willing to help, but wants to save herself. There are passages of breathtaking treachery and a net seems to draw tight. Ultimately, we get a climax of mild action and escape. But then the lens draws back and we realize that perhaps we don't yet understand this novel after all.

In a way, this novel might itself be a sort of seizure. It arises mysteriously and releases storms of energy. Thoroughly eccentric, but completely convincing characters are drawn into brief constellation. Meaningless rituals are enacted with total conviction. And at the heart of the obsession are the bees, humming and rubbing in their winter hive. Finally, just as mysteriously, the events exhaust themselves and the novel, quite literally, collapses onto a couch.

Or perhaps the parallel is "Midsummer Night's Dream," which is quoted at several points. "Missing World" has similar viscous jealousies and transporting slumbers. Characters make fools of themselves for love. Ultimately, they awaken and can recall neither the love nor the peril. Only a sense of loss and longing remains. The result is comic, but far from harmless

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Second Chances Gone Awry, March 12, 2000

By 

Kerry Madden "Kerry Madden" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Missing World (Hardcover)

The brilliant idea behind this novel is the idea of "second chances" to right the wrongs one has committed, and who doesn't want to get a second chance tossed his or her way once in a while? So I began this book somehow pulling for Jonathan who is hoping to make ammends after the disasterous breakup with his girlfriend Hazel - who P.S. - has amnesia after an accident and can't remember that they are finished. Then Margot Livesey so deftly and eerily twists the story, and the character of Jonathan is gradually unpeeled, layer after layer, until we want to leap into the pages to rescue Hazel. The other characters surrounding Hazel and Jonathan are just as fascinating and disturbing, one of my favorites being Charlotte, an out-of-work actress with a magnificent heart that gets trampled upon constantly, whether it's by her unforgiving sister, Nurse Bernie, or her louse of a boyfriend. The Missing World really is a stunning read and quite impossible to put down.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an intricate, moving novel, February 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Missing World (Hardcover)

I found THE MISSING WORLD extraordinary for how it renders the complexity of its characters, their deep flaws and deep yearnings, while never backing up and passing judgment on them. By shifting points of view, Margot Livesey allows us to keep seeing the world of this novel from multiple vantage points; the results are at once gripping and psychologically complex. The novel explores memory and repression, the way people can manipulate each other, the blindness of both love and hatred--all while being an unbelievably engrossing read.