Signs for Lost Children

Moss’s previous work includes two interrelated novels, Night Waking and Bodies of Light. Signs for Lost Children, her most recent, is the third in that series, picking up more or less where Bodies of Light left off. It follows the career of Alethea (Ally) Moberley, a fictional character who, along with her associates, is reputedly modelled on the pioneering group of female medical students known as the Edinburgh Seven, some of the first women to qualify as doctors in Britain. At the beginning of Signs, Ally has graduated, married, is living in Cornwall and is commencing voluntary work at a lunatic asylum in order to pursue her interest in mental illness.

Unsurprisingly, Ally encounters push-back from all sides and in all forms: the local gentry, the vicar’s wife, nurses at the asylum. She also has some surprising but reassuring allies, which is a nice touch in what might otherwise be a bleak narrative landscape. Her husband, Tom, is an almost absurdly advanced feminist ally who supports her unconditionally, but near the beginning he is sent away on a long voyage to Japan to build lighthouses, and possibly symbolically reassert his masculinity. Part of the genius of Moss is that she doesn’t content herself with Ally being beset by misogynist antagonists, but also contrasts them with the alternative tyranny of Ally’s mother, Elizabeth Moberley: a zealous campaigner for the rights and health of working women, children, and prostitutes, obsessed with charity but incapable of showing anything but cruelty to her own family. One detail I particularly enjoyed was in the variations of Ally’s name (a mechanism also used in Night Waking, a book set over a hundred years later). On her marriage, she chose to adopt the name Moberley Cavendish. Throughout the novel, those seeking to undermine her status as a doctor and independent human call her “Mrs Cavendish”; her mother, who views her marriage both as servitude and as a selfish diversion from her true vocation, refers to her as “Dr Moberley”.

The structure of the bulk of the novel consists of alternating chapters following Ally’s life in England and Tom’s in Japan. In terms of strict plot, not much actually happens; most of the action is psychological. Those who followed Ally’s traumatic childhood and adolescence in Bodies of Light are aware of the forces aligned against her when she returns to her parents’ home in Manchester, but even so, I’m not sure I really remembered her mother’s cruelty, and her father’s willing helplessness, in sufficient degree until re-presented with them. The chapters on either side of that visit, depicting Ally internally encountering the destructive power of her mother’s critical voice, are powerfully drawn, and powerfully frustrating to read. The narrative strand following Tom’s journey is mostly less interesting, and to be honest, at times I questioned whether it was really a necessary counterpoint; in the end, I think it was probably a good idea to obtain a little distance from Ally’s emotional turmoil, though there were some unresolved elements in Tom’s narrative that were a little baffling.

I’m not sure I particularly recall the prose of Moss’s earlier works, which were more plot-driven, but it’s a bit more in the foreground here. There is a poetic emphasis on landscape, especially on rain and on the quality of light, which provides an imaginative context for the depiction of time and place in both England and Japan. The pace of the novel is different to Bodies of Light; Ally, along with Tom, is eventually forced into rest and observation, but even before that, the narrative eye is primarily turned inwards, and the language of the novel is correspondingly more allusive and evocative. Some of it is a little heavy-handed: the passage through autumn and winter as the separation of Ally and Tom, for instance, is fairly trite, though I suppose they had to be apart for some seasons. All the same, I feel like this latest work shows off her development as a writer beautifully, and I’m excited to see what she does next.