The Missing

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His 2010 novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, [9] is told in the voice of a Scottish Maltese poodle ("Maf"), the name of the real dog given by Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe in 1960. It was published by Faber & Faber in May 2010 and won O'Hagan a Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. There was a courtroom in Dursley, Gloucestershire, where they played us the tapes of Rosemary West being interviewed. As they were playing, the novelist Gordon Burn tilted up his notepad towards me. It simply said: "The Uncanny." Gordon was by then a veteran of life-estranging murder stories, but he later said he had nightmares about the West case, as did the case's best reporter, the Guardian's Duncan Campbell, who led me by the hand. The notion of missing persons helps us here, although in O’Hagan’s work it is, appropriately, rather elusive at first. There are ‘all sorts’ of missing persons, he tells us, and he gives us a haunting account of many vanishings, especially of children. ‘The space they occupy lies somewhere between what we know about the ways of being alive and what we hear about the ways of being dead . . . The person missing cannot be brought into focus.’ But then it turns out that for O’Hagan the worst, in many cases, is not to be missing. The worst is to be found, the grisly end of the mystery, ‘the dark, worst, last thing’. He doesn’t simply mean that death, the finally identified corpse, is the end of everyone’s hope. He means that death repeals the whole implied adventure of being missing, and a certain tantalising ambiguity enters the picture. This is where he says: ‘I’ve been looking for missing persons, in my own head, for as long as I can remember.’ In context, the sentence confesses a fear that many children have, and take with them into adult life: that they could be among the missing, or perhaps already are. Taken more broadly, though, it’s not a bad description of what novelists do. They look in their own heads for a special class of missing persons: people who can’t be found because they don’t exist and so can’t die. In The Missing, the emphasis is on the sudden and distressing absence of real people, the failure of focus. O’Hagan’s novels concentrate on the temptation of flight, of going missing from your old life, and the virtue of fiction in such an inquiry is that it allows us to shadow the missing persons, even eavesdrop on their minds, without quite finding them. The novels, unlike the first book, insist on the incompleteness of most disappearances, and this is where we meet the all too faithful children and the all too persistent parents. The fact is that both approaches are possible, as Orwell understood. Fifteen thousand words of The Missing appeared in the Guardian, while, not long after publication, the then literary director of the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh spoke about a stage version. I went to see him a dozen years ago, but I just didn't feel ready to write it: I suppose I was still a little haunted by the correspondences the book had revealed to me, and was keen to man the sails in a voyage out from there.

This is a hard book to classify in terms of what kind of writing it is. Documentary? Autobiography? Journalism? Memoir? Expose? Critical Writing? Does it matter. O'Hagan's writing is as ever challenging and excellent and like the very best of writers he makes you think beyond, outside of the written text. I suppose the only other kind of book I can imagine coming close to this kind of work would be George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. The same kind of intensity pervades the text. In the same way that those two books spoke, The Missing is about the dispossessed and the underclass, those that are easily overlooked by the mainstream because they live on the peripheries. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Patten, Eve; Woodward, Guy. "Andrew O'Hagan". British Council . Retrieved 26 September 2021. [by] Dr Eve Patten, 2003 and Dr Guy Woodward, 2012 What characterises all his work however, is a resolute political and historical engagement. Though particularly perceptive in detailing the bittersweet experiences of 1970s childhood and the layered community histories of both rural and urban Scotland in the post-war era, his writing has most force in confronting British ideological fragmentation, and the many questions surrounding Scotland’s troubled claims for a coherent national identity.Calling Bible John Portrait of a Serial Killer". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 23 January 2010 . Retrieved 13 November 2011.

a b O'Hagan, Andrew (6 March 2014). "Ghosting". London Review of Books. 36 (5): 5–26 . Retrieved 12 April 2019. I worked very closely with Claire and her Head of Development, Deanne Cunningham, on how to structure the scripts for a television audience and we made the decision to tell it in two inter connected timelines, and not in two separate halves. The second half of the book is the dominant narrative and 1986 is presented as a series of vivid memories, triggered by Jimmy and Tully’s emotional state in the present day. Novels and screen stories are two very different forms and the challenge of any adaptation is taking the essence of the novel, keeping the truth of it, while making it work as a dramatic and visual experience. The reach of his sense of home extends beyond this room. He finds time to run a cafe at the end of the street, with Sam Frears, the charismatic son of Stephen and Mary-Kay Wilmers who was born with severely disabling Riley-Day syndrome – and to be a global Unicef ambassador. “For me,” O’Hagan says at one point, “the idea of society isn’t some Henry Jamesian world of dinner parties, it is being so good at being civilised that we want to let different people waft in, whatever their beginning in life.”In 1995, he published his first book, The Missing, which drew from his own childhood and explored the lives of people who have gone missing in Britain and the families left behind. The Missing was shortlisted for three literary awards: the Esquire Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award, and the McVities Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year award. [2] I read the book before it had been published and before it went out to the public and fell in love with it immediately. It’s been amazing, and perhaps a little daunting, to see how well it’s been received and how it’s been lauded as a profound and tender work. It’s both of those things but it’s also very funny and never sombre, even when it’s exploring the reality of our mortality. This is a book about life and death and everything in between. It’s a huge responsibility to adapt something so humane and I really hope I’ve done it justice. The new novel is far more varied technically than Our Fathers, and extremely accomplished. A controlling third-person narrative is interspersed with first-person accounts from all the main characters and some minor ones; there are diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings. Dialect is both represented and dropped at well chosen times. There is so much wit in this book, so much energy and affection, especially for the members of the Scottish community Maria leaves behind when she heads south to find fame (her depressed mother, her haunted grandmother, the mother’s flamboyant boyfriend, Maria’s gay uncle, her Indian schoolfriend and a host of clients of her mother’s café), that an intriguing riddle arises. A deliberate riddle, clearly, and part of O’Hagan’s project, but a riddle all the same. How can this new novel, so much less grim in its theme and its content than its predecessor, turn out to be so much sadder? Jimmy is from the west coast of Scotland; he moves to London and becomes a successful writer in the literary world. Jimmy’s a good guy who has done well for himself but hasn’t forgotten his roots; he’s nostalgic, romanticises his past, his friends and his family and has a big heart. He was great to play. In Mayflies, Tully and Jimmy’s first move toward getting out is to that music weekend in Manchester. The friends see The Smiths walking through a pub, where Morrissey “hit[s] the air like a chip pan fire” – a very 1980s simile, I point out. “I’m claiming it, the chip pan fire!” O’Hagan says. “The great chip pan fire novelist of the age!”