THE REST IS SILENCE

In Whitfield’s novel, a British teenager disappears—seemingly into thin air—one evening in 1939.

Quiet and private, Muriel always seemed out of place with her five siblings in the rambunctious Mead family; their home was “never still and was unruly even by the standards of the day.” Her parents held the reins slack, so her disappearance on the way home from school didn’t cause immediate panic—the case went unsolved for eight decades. Doubling down, Whitfield has conjured up two fictional books by two fictional authors about this fictional character’s disappearance: The first is From a Green Lane, by Dr. Cecilia Cardiff; the second, The Second Life of Muriel Mead, is by Seren Jones. Cardiff is an independent researcher, and her account reads like a step-by-step investigative report with a heavy academic flavor, festooned with footnotes. Her book purports to have been published in 1987, and she was unable to crack the mystery, even though she was convinced that Muriel was kidnapped and murdered by one Potter Shaw, a taciturn neighboring egg farmer. Jones’ book is quite different, being a portrait of Hariet Head, a quiet, private, very old woman who lives off by herself a long walk away from the author’s own place in a Welsh village. They become friends, and eventually Jones discovers that “Hariet Head” is indeed Muriel Mead. (The new name was not chosen to hide her identity but was simply a result of sloppy handwriting on a form.) It turns out that Potter Shaw was a very benign and wise friend to Muriel, who, stumbling upon a traumatic family secret, took off by herself in almost a fugue state. After working as a wartime Land Girl, she met her life partner, Paco, and they had a daughter, Francisca, who now lives in Spain. She is very accepting of her life, but when she finds Cardiff’s book by pure chance, she’s understandably agitated, and her past comes flooding out.

Cardiff’s search of records, diaries, and newspaper accounts is presented with such perfect pitch that one keeps forgetting that the premise is fictional, and that there never was a Muriel Mead. Cardiff salts her telling with references to actual sensational cases in Britain at the time and later, and the footnotes are really icing on the scone. Jones, on the other hand, presents a very down-to-earth and tender account of a caring woman who comes to love and worry about an eccentric nonagenarian (Jones and her daughters care tenderly for Muriel in her last days and see to her burial). And Muriel’s discovery of Cardiff’s book (references to Wales, where Whitfield lives, seem to playfully hover over this book) allows readers to make other connections, illuminating things in Cardiff’s account that needed correcting or that turned out to have been true, after all. Cardiff’s account is affecting in the way that she clearly comes to love this mystery girl and aches to see justice done. Muriel is in many ways a dispenser of grace—despite her pinched self.

A cleverly conceived book that will leave readers in a brown study long after the final page.