Crimes of the past

Maggie O'Farrell's three previous novels have been respectfully reviewed, but her new one radiates the kind of energy that marks a classic. Think Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," or Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper": stories that illuminate the suffering endured by women in polite society. To that list add "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox." At the heart of this fantastic new novel is a mystery you want to solve until you start to suspect the truth, and then you read on in a panic, horrified that you may be right.

The structure of the novel is a challenge, the kind of purposefully scrambled puzzle that makes you wonder if it's all just too much work to figure out who's talking and what happened when. But forge on: O'Farrell isn't showing off; she's forcing us to participate in a ghastly conspiracy of forgetting.

In the present day, we meet Iris Lockhart, a Scottish shop owner who specializes in vintage clothing. She's entangled in an unsatisfying affair with a married man and a mostly repressed relationship with her stepbrother. The last thing she has time for is a cryptic letter, then a phone call from a nearby mental hospital. It seems budget cuts have encouraged the staff to re-evaluate all their patients, and some old woman named Euphemia Lennox is being released after 60 years.

"I have no idea who you people are or what you want," Iris tells them, "but I've never heard of Euphemia Lennox."

Yet, it turns out that Euphemia -- Esme -- is her great-aunt, a woman no one in her family has ever mentioned. Friends warn her not to get involved, but then Iris meets her in the fetid hospital: She had been "expecting someone frail or infirm … But this woman is tall, with an angular face and searching eyes. She has an air of slight hauteur, the expression arch, the brows raised. Although she must be in her 70s, there is something incongruously childlike about her. ... Without warning, Euphemia's hand shoots out and seizes her wrist. Iris cannot help herself: she jumps back, turning to look for the nurse. Immediately Euphemia lets go. 'Don't worry,' she says, with an odd smile. 'I don't bite.' "

That mix of sympathy, wit and menace is only part of what makes the novel so irresistible. Seeing Esme's desperation, Iris decides to help her find somewhere to live. They're both terrified the first night: Iris expects to be stabbed by the "mad old woman," while Esme worries she'll be sent back.

Modern cars and planes are marvels to her, but the wind, the sea, the freedom to walk, "her first unsupervised bath for over 60 years," these are the pleasures Esme soaks up, and her wonder makes Iris re-examine everything around her.

But beneath this poignant story, O'Farrell has written a searing indictment of the way psychiatry was used to control women and girls who refused to conform. Searching for an explanation of her aunt's incarceration in the 1940s, Iris finds reports in the hospital's archives that regard psychotic and perfectly ordinary behavior with equal suspicion. Finally, she finds Esme's admission report. It contains weirdly innocuous details: "Insists on keeping her hair long. ... Parents report finding her dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother's clothes."

The solution to this puzzle comes slowly in two vastly different and much older stories that O'Farrell weaves through the description of Iris' nervous weekend with her aunt. It's a challenge, but you'll eventually learn to recognize these disparate voices -- and come to see the brilliance of scrambling them like this. In one, an omniscient narrator tells brief, Gothic anecdotes about Esme's adolescence as the precocious daughter of a wealthy Scottish family that had lived in India.

Then there is another narrator, the strange, pained, truly mad voice of Esme's sister, Kitty, whose mind is ravaged by Alzheimer's. Torn by crosscurrents of guilt and self-justification, Kitty's narrative starts and stops in mid-sentences. The shards of information don't make any sense at first, but slowly a horrible image of what happened in their house begins to develop.

In O'Farrell's fierce, engrossing novel, the crimes of the past rear up with surprising vengeance. Esme Lennox won't vanish again anytime soon.