{ carrying weights to remind you of the terrible state I'm in. }

[delga]

Watch Me Disappear, Jill Dawson.

And it's a bright morning, blanched and clean, the colour of mist. Mum always hated this landscape. It's the openness. Exposed. Mum loves hills and valleys, crooked paths and dark built-up hedges, crumbling stone cottages: the Yorkshire of the James Herriot programme, a Yorkshire she'd never visited. To me Yorkshire is oppressively pretty and, well, just not flat enough. Not enough sky. Bleak, plain, uncluttered: that's what I've always loved. The way you can see the horizon from more or less anywhere. When I'd progressed from those drawings with a white space in the centre and learned to make the sky and land join up, I still drew it with sky filling most of the page and a tiny black bar of land at the bottom. Land of the Three Quarter Sky. That's what it used to be called, the Fens.

Hmm. I don't know what to say about this book (that I still haven't finished). It's about a woman whose return to the Fen brings up memories of her childhood friend's abduction. I've read a couple of reviews for it, and they seem - to me, anyway - to be missing the point somewhat. But I can't really describe what makes this novel so compelling. The narrative, firstly, switches between the past and the present, but it also smoothly changes age subtly each time it goes back. Secondly, it's narrative with a focused lens, so close to bodies that you can't always pull back and create the whole picture. And then there's that sky, and that soil, and all these images of East Anglia. One of the reviewers said:

Like Julie Myerson and Graham Swift, [Dawson] seems intent on making East Anglia the creepiest region in literature. (source.)

It seems to me that this is not a person who has ever lived here. On the one hand, a common lament is that nothing happens here. It's the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles upon miles of nothing. On the other hand, that's really sort of the point. It's easy to love a landscape amassed with hills; it gives the eye something to do. But it's something else to look at what we have here and see how lovely it can be, unadorned and so on. I don't know; Dawson's narrator loves the clear expanse, the earthiness of the area, and I like that about the narrative. It's strange to have your world reflected back to you. I don't live in New York City, I don't have people talking about this area all the time, and not positively, anyway. Dawson's narrator isn't blind; it's a harsh landscape in her words, but that's not a criticism.

A sky you can touch, taste, with nothing in it but a fine thread of geese, like the tail of a child's kite. The light is so bright that the straight lines of the ditches shine like strips of silver foil and the horizon is another straight line, this time of poplars. Stiff, uniform, shorn bristles on a chin. Fields and fields: artificial as squares of black and green carpet. A land-entirely man-made. Constantly requiring effort, belief, imagination, just to make it exist.

But back to the novel: when I first picked it up I thought I had the end sussed. I was wrong, but mostly because there's a few details missing in the blurb. But when you read the book, the conclusion is still obvious. I'm still crawling my way there, but I don't think the conclusion is at all the point. It's getting there that takes doing, and that's the focus for Dawson's protagonist.