Watch Me Disappear [Paperback]

Watch me disappear has everything you can ask for from a novel: it's compelling, engaging, moving and it draws you imperceptibly into another person's life while at the same time shedding light on your own.

Tina Humber lives a seemingly enviable existence: she's a successful English-born marine biologist who has made a life for herself in the United States with a loving partner and a happy, gifted daughter.

Yet when she accepts an invitation to go to her brother's marriage in the Fenland home of her youth, she is taking on more than a simple familial obligation. She is about to revisit a childhood world in which her school friend Mandy Baker goes missing, never to be seen again. This is a place where innocence is shattered and the dark secrets of family life seem to threaten even her own survival.

Watch me disappear is the fifth novel by the Whitbread and Orange Prize nominated author Jill Dawson whose previous works include Fred and Edie and Wild Boy. The characters, landscapes, dialogue and imagery are natural yet eerily haunting throughout; it's a work seems to move effortlessly from the page into the recesses of the reader's mind, yet clearly it can't have been an easy subject for a mother-of-two to enter into so profoundly.

Much like dreams themselves, the inherent elusiveness of memory is a constant theme throughout a novel which refuses to give simple, two-dimensional solutions to traumatic childhood events viewed through an adult's subjective perspective.

Despite the fragmentary and sometimes ghostlike nature of Tina's recollections, Watch me disappear gains much of its power from the sharp and often amusing descriptions of an English girl's life as she enters adolescence in the early 1970s and the agricultural world that surrounds her.

The whole thing is beautifully composed as Dawson shows complete mastery of period detail and in-depth knowledge of the seahorses which are the focal point of Tina's professional life and also an ongoing metaphor for her threatened existence.

Nevertheless, unlike some other well-researched novels, the scientific and historical insights provided in this book never distract from a gripping narrative drive and characterisations that carry you through to the last page and beyond.

Much like the experiences of the central character herself, the dreams and images of this novel are likely to stay in your conscious and subconscious mind for a long time after you've finished Watch me disappear.

Buy this book - you won't find a better read this year.

Watch Me Disappear is a haunting exploration of the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a ten year old girl, Mandy Baker, and the impact this has thirty years later on the narrator, Tina Humber, a schoolfriend of Mandy, as she begins to unravel the puzzle and realise who was responsible. Once I'd started it, I couldn't put it down - it draws you in and you have to read on.

The world of childhood in the seventies is brilliantly evoked, as is the onset of sexual awareness and the way it confers both power and vulnerability on young teenage girls.

The novel slides effortlessly between the present and the past, the reader's understanding deepening along with Tina's. She is a marine biologist and one of the delights of the book is the way that her work with seahorses is woven into the story.

The fens which are the backdrop for the story are powerfully described, making their presence felt almost like another character.

Everything is described with pin-sharp detail that's very enjoyable and yet the story is very readable; it bowls along to the end, when I felt satisfied, yet sorry because it was over. But I cheered myself up by thinking I could read it again - it's the sort of many-layered book that you can return to more than once.

Tina has returned to her birthplace in the Fens for a family wedding, after years of happy exile in the USA. Haunted (quite literally) by the disappearance of her childhood friend and the tension in her family as she grew up, Tina's return sparks an emotional keg as she begins to remember more and more about the past; not just her childhood, but her adolescence as well.

"Watch Me Disappear" is an absorbing novel, with beautiful descriptions of the Fens, the fragility of memory and the lurking fears at the back of the mind which you don't want to examine too closely. It has a loose episodic structure, which is ideal if you want to dip in and out of the book. However, this structure also means you can get quite impatient: just when Tina is talking about something interesting, she will veer off and focus on something else; while realistic, this becomes increasingly irritating as the climax draws closer.

Moreover, the disappearance of a child in a small community has already been written about in a book published last year, the excellent "Eve Green" by Susan Fletcher. There are enough differences in the storylines to keep both books fresh, but anyone who has read that will find some portions of this book rather familiar. Sadly, although the writing was good, I'd guessed who was responsible for the disappearance before I was half way through the novel.

Buy this book for its fine writing and musings on life and memory, not for plot twists.