Dean Nicholas
posted 24 September 2007

Girl drowns. Family mourns. And mourns. And mourns. The end. That’s how a more time- and column inch-pressed reviewer might summarise Margaret Forster’s Orange Prize-nominated Over. Still, that’s hardly the kind of purple prose that will find it’s way onto the paperback reprint, is it?

Set three years after a boating accident in which 18-year old Miranda died, the novel sets out to examine in forensic detail what happens to a middle-class family when tragedy struck. Like Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time, Forster’s novel is all about the aftermath: how the family unit spins out of control amidst the chilling of previous emotional bonds and the quickening resentment at the way others respond.

The early chapters, by far the most interesting, depict how the family has splintered as a result of the accident. Miranda’s mother Louise, the novel’s narrator and only clearly defined character, has sold the family home and moved into a spartan flat; her estranged husband Don, meanwhile, remains convinced that the death was no random accident, and has dedicated his life to his daughter’s memory, spending his waking hours hunting for a culprit in the form of a technical flaw in the boat’s design. Molly, Miranda’s twin sister, has fled abroad to do charity work.

The early chapters are strung along at a leisurely pace, as the narration flits between Louise’s work as a schoolteacher, the routines of her prescribed life, and her recollections of the pivotal event itself. Forster slowly works around to having Louise reveal the specific details of her daughter’s accident, drawing out the tension through specious, measured references to Don’s ‘investigations’, and delaying her protagonist’s ability actually to lay down the precise words that describe her daughter’s fate. These early stages unfold as elliptical, diary-like entries, thought bubbles that slide out of Louise’s pen: her calm mundanity and matter-of-fact description of her quotidian days is neatly jolted into relief by the unbearable memories that leap from nowhere.

As the novel progresses, though, Forster gently and gradually undercuts her character’s plausibility. Louise’s analysis of her family’s differing reactions is uncompromising, and her moral superiority shines through in comparison: she resents her estranged husband for his refusal to accept that what happened was an accident, while she appreciates what she interprets as the maturity of her son and his ability to move on. Her thoughts towards the surviving twin, Molly, are less explicit: there is a mixture of pride, and hurt, at her African charity work. It is Molly’s return that spins the quixotic, solipsistic Louise into a re-examination of just how her own reaction is, in its own way, as damaging and self-deluding as her husband’s.

Unfortunately, Forster is unable to sustain interest in this nuclear family fallout through the whole novel. With regards to the plot, she plays her cards early, and once the details of Miranda’s death are revealed, the momentum evaporates. Forster’s writing throughout is clean and crisp, resisting melodramatic perorations, but the lack of narrative strand does lead to dry, often lifeless text. The second half of the novel is hooked around Louise’s gradual realisation that – despite her loathing of her husband, for his extroverted and extravagant search for the ‘truth’ – her introversion, her stripping bare of the life she had before, is equally as damaging to what remains of the family unit. This occurs over such a span of pages, with such slight increments, that it’s difficult to care one way or another what happens to the characters. Meanwhile, the word count is clocked up with episodes in which Louise visits her friends, barely-delineated ciphers who Forster uses prosaically (the tough sporty type who never married; the wife never able to have children). The bare bones writing in these moments is at times indigestible, although the occasional phrase – watching the TV coverage of Dunblane and the mothers, ‘fear tightening their faces’, for example - suggests Forsters restrained aesthetic is a conscious choice.

The novel also tends, for a sense of drama, to rely too heavily on spurious coincidences and chance encounters. Returning from holiday, Louise sits next to a newly-wed young couple, the wife the namesake of her lost daughter; Miranda’s name, and her aquatic demise, hint at a deeper resonance with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is never really explained. Moments like these come across as spurious and lacking in the stark verisimilitude that the author strives for in the rest of the novel.

Ultimately, Forster’s biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Not enough work has been done by the author in creating a plausible situation or sympathetic characters that can affect the reader; and when the plot is this slight, the lack of an interesting protagonist is dramatic. Perhaps it suffers due to contemporaneous events in the real world; when the news is dominated by a story as gripping as the Madeleine McCann disappearance, a not-dissimilar work of fiction is bound to come off second-best.