We then follow her on the journey that he takes her which, without giving too much away, takes her to a crumbling old house before heading off to another land and what can only be described as a cult. She is also finding her mother’s protective nature cloying and annoying until, she believes, her mother has had an accident and the grandfather she has never met comes to her aide. She is clearly angry and unsure why her parents have split up, which Beth relates to us, before she goes missing. We then also get the complete opposite perspective from Carmel. Maybe we’ll call out to them and make them jump. Or will I sit with her, high up in the beech tree, playing games? Spying on the people who live in our house and watching their comings and goings. The smoke from chimneys billowing and swaying from the movement of my wings as I pass through. Turned into an owl and flying over the fields at night, swooping over crouching hedges and dark lanes.
Sometimes I wonder if when I’m dead I’m destined to be looking still. On the one hand we get the mothers view of her fears for her child when there isn’t any danger, the situation that she and her daughter have found themselves before she goes missing, then the horrors, followed by the dreadful sense of loss (and clinging to hope) when she is gone. Chapters alternate, though sometimes one voice will take over for a few chapters, between Beth and Carmel from the very start. Firstly there is the way that it is told. The Girl in the Red Coat is, quite literally in two ways, a book of two halves. This is the power of Hamer’s writing and yet it is a mere foreshadowing of what she puts you through when Carmel is abducted by a man mere months later at a storytelling festival, the aftermath of which becomes the crux of the novel. The sense of foreboding, unease, tension and fear that Hamer builds up in Beth as she searches madly for her daughter is palpable, I was utterly tense (far more than I was about being on the plane whilst reading it) for what felt like forever though was actually only a few pages. Hamer plays on this instinct early on in The Girl With The Red Coat when, and I hope this isn’t giving too much away, Beth takes her daughter, Carmel, on a day out and loses her in a maze. He was right, there’d been nothing.įor anyone who has had children, or has looked after them, the biggest fear when you take them anywhere for a day out is that you will lose them. The wind seemed to have scattered them and time snipped them off. Or Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs. Leads – those invisible wires that could take us to her. ‘There’s been nothing for weeks,’ said Paul eventually. Faber & Faber, 2015, paperback, fiction, 384 pages, kindly sent by the publisher
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