Book Review

The Vanishing Act By Mette Jakobsen

Set on a remote island, sometime after ‘the war’, The Vanishing Act examines its handful of residents through the eyes of Minou, a twelve year old girl, one year after the disappearance of her mother. After finding a dead boy washed up on to the shore, Minou reflects on her life and the tales of her parents, flashing between her past and present as she, and the other characters attempt to find some sort of peace.

All of the characters in The Vanishing Act are delicately woven, their problems handled gently through the observations of the young narrator. Minou’s father, the philosopher, who seeks comfort in his quest for the absolute truth and desperately clings to the belief that he is the descendant of Descartes, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise; Priest, so scared of the dark that he keeps the church spectacularly lit and rings the church bells during storms to keep his fears at bay; Boxman, a magician, turned builder of magicians’ boxes, hiding away from heartbreak; and, in flashbacks, Minou’s mother, passionate and imaginative, yet deeply sad, and unhappy with her self-imposed isolation. Each, in a different novel, could have been a broken person, hiding away from civilisation to avoid the difficulties that it engenders. Instead, through the warm and loving, if confused, eyes of the twelve year old narrator, it is their care for each other that shines through, and this allows each to take on a gentle eccentricity as they try to heal.

Although the novel spends time with each of these characters, it is Minou who is its heart and it is her struggles that carry the most pathos. The way that she sneaks out of bed each night to sleep in the lighthouse. The way she makes a cup of tea each morning for her mother, adamant that she is alive and will walk gaily in the door one day, full of tales of her time away. And the way that she slowly comes to accept what has truly happened. Jakobsen also shows us Minou’s gradual reconciliation of her different inheritances; the slow embrace of her mother’s flights of imagination alongside her ready acceptance of her father’s solid logic and reason.

It takes a while to fall into the language of the story, particularly the conversations, as they can be fragmentary and stilted, but once you do, there is a lovely stillness to the novel that envelops the reader and keeps one inside its gentle narrative. Surfacing again is like coming out of a trance as you return to the hustle and bustle of everyday life, so far removed from the slow and steady pace of the book.

There is a certain whimsy to The Vanishing Act that makes it appealing, but I’m not quite sure where it will find its audience. Too adult for children, but still very much in the vein of a fairy tale, this is for adults after a dash of melancholic innocence. Not without its flaws, this is still a lovely debut and will happily capture the reader’s imagination over its short length.

- Sky Kirkham

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