The Year of Fog
by Michelle Richmond

Release Date: 1st Apr 2010
Publisher: Ebury Press
ISBN: 978 0 0919 2892 6
RRP: £6.99

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A child in your care goes missing - how long do you look for her?

Imagine losing someone else’s child. Imagine how you would feel for those immediate seconds following the realisation that something irreversible has occurred; then the days, weeks and months that conspire against you in your everlasting search for that missing child. Your conviction that you are one instant away from looking up and seeing her again slowly driving you mad. That is the world into which we are thrust in The Year of Fog; a cold harshness, a biting reality that sears the heart and makes you feel empty. For all that, is it insensitive to feel detached from it? To feel uncomfortable in the voyeuristic narrative of a bewildered and tormented individual barely surviving the impact, the emotional repercussions? To want to turn away, put the book down and pretend that it’s just fiction and therefore meaningless?

The pages turn slowly, sometimes repetitively regurgitating the same sense of loss and despair but in a kaleidoscopic array of mismatched memories, intransient feelings and idle ponderings. Sometimes, all that is are brief snatches of emotion before the journey continues and we are caught up in the search once again. All too often, it is pitifully morose and disturbingly reclusive. It is hard to know if you're enjoying the story, or whether from some morbid fascination you cannot put the book down.

The Year of Fog is tough. Idiosyncratic in its telling. There is an indefinable expectation that permeates the narrative; you are perpetually awaiting some event, some twist, something to bring the story from its morbidity to relief – a malingering sense of foreboding that you want to be dispelled. The incessant interruptions, like essays in miniature on the nature of memory, how it is fashioned, moulded, altered; how it can be corrupted, captured, manipulated, expunged – nuggets of information systematically filed in between the story itself – a relevant distraction. Richmond interlaces the extremity of emotion with the distance of activity; in doing so, she has constructed a narrative that is both terrifyingly poignant and distressingly real.

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