Book Review: Readings

Hide & Seek

by Clare Sambrook

Canongate, 284 pp., $21

The disappearance of a child is a wretched topic for a novel. It's a topic better suited to short news items where you don't have to warm to the child's personality and then feel the subsequent emptiness when he's lost and then experience the slow numbing of his family through first the minutes, then the days, and then the weeks when their son is simply, inexplicably gone. That might be why Clare Sambrook tells the story of 4-year-old Daniel's disappearance through the eyes of his 9-year-old brother, Harry. His observations let us in on his family's grief and rarely spare us gritty detail, but his naïveté shields us just enough from utter hopelessness. Daniel disappears after a school field trip to Legoland, a trip Harry describes in full as he recalls running around the park with his friends and having a "brilliant day" with no idea that his world's about to fall apart. Sambrook is at her best here, making the remote minutiae of life as a kid familiar again. For Harry even a single bus ride is rife with importance, each detail marking the shifting hierarchies among friends and schoolmates. These might seem like childish concerns, but Hide & Seek works as an adult book; Harry's perspective allows Sambrook full reign to magnify the strange behaviors of people in crisis, giving equal weight to Harry's bed-wetting as to his parents' disintegrating relationship. The problem with Harry is not his age, then, but his inconsistent voice, which sometimes seems too calculated in its strategically perceptive observations of the adult world and at other times seems artificial; when he describes how his mom "clucked" him into the bathroom or how he "tussled" with his brother, his language seems more appropriate to the scarf-wearing woman featured on the book jacket than to a 9-year-old who farts at every opportunity. Still, Sambrook admirably captures the strain of feeling your way through the grieving process, especially when a taken-for-granted support network disappears and you must construct a new one from scratch. Harry may be just a kid, but aren't we all when tragedy strikes?