I have been reading Andrew O’Hagan’s work for more than twenty years. In a strange and roundabout way, it is partly because of O’Hagan that Chris and I came to live in Scotland. I first visited the Isle of Bute after having recently read O’Hagan’s debut novel Personality, which follows the life of a young woman from a Scottish-Italian family with a talent for singing that overturns her life as much as it defines it. The precocious young singer in Personality is based on Lena Zavaroni, who was born and brought up in Rothesay. I fell in love with O’Hagan’s book, which is as much about the Scottish-Italian experience in general as about the unforgiving and often exploitative nature of the entertainment industry, and, when I happened to be visiting Glasgow in the late spring of 2003 I was determined to make the trip to Bute as well. There is a photo of me on the ferry, sailing into Rothesay harbour – this was before the new ferry terminal was opened in the late 2000s and we still had the smaller, ‘streaker’ ferries. I remember sitting eating an ice cream in Zavaroni’s ice cream parlour on the esplanade and feeling as if I had made some sort of pilgrimage. I never forgot my trip to Bute, and when I told Chris about the island, its milder climate and unique atmosphere, there was clearly something in what I said that caught at his imagination.
Chris was never particularly interested in Lena Zavaroni, but he greatly admired O’Hagan’s 2017 book The Secret Life, in which O’Hagan explores through three extended essays themes of identity, conspiracy, and secrecy within the context of the digital revolution. These essays – the most famous of which tells the story of what happened when O’Hagan was hired to ghost-write the autobiography of Julian Assange – are superb, risk-taking, compulsive reading, and one of the things I have come to admire most about O’Hagan is his equal facility with fiction and non-fiction. I revisited his first book, The Missing this week, and found it still more powerful and more original than I did the first time I read it a decade ago, firstly I think because I am now living so much nearer to Glasgow, where a good chunk of the book’s focus lies, and secondly because the themes it interrogates are in such close alignment with my own literary interests.
The Missing begins in the east end of Glasgow, where O’Hagan was born, and with the sudden loss of his grandfather Michael, whose ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the second world war. His wife Molly receives a telegram telling her that Michael is missing in action, believed drowned. But there is no proof, no body, no certainty. ‘He was missing,’ the young O’Hagan learns. ‘I’d never seen him, and I was born twenty-eight years after he disappeared at sea. … My granda Michael looked like Glasgow: a place that felt far away by then, that sounded old and big and always in the dark.’
Growing up on one of the new housing estates in the coastal town of Irvine, O’Hagan always felt that he ‘couldn’t get over’ his grandfather’s missing-ness, a state that both defined him and erased him. As a lad, O’Hagan ran wild with the other kids on the estate, participating in the kind of rough play and minor acts of vandalism that can sometimes tip over the edge into something darker. When a toddler goes missing on the estate, that harsh duality is further underlined. O’Hagan eventually grows away from his beginnings, discovering new possibilities and freedoms through the world of books. But it is not too great a leap to imagine that it is these early experiences of someone being missing that lie behind his continuing preoccupation with the subject as a writer. The landscape of trauma and unanswered questions. The different ways in which a person can go missing, or fall into the kind of social invisibility that ceases to be a choice and becomes a prelude to tragedy.
O’Hagan recounts his visits to homeless shelters, his interviews with those who take refuge there – some of them listed as missing who do not want to be found – and with the staff at the National Missing Persons Helpline who work tirelessly to establish links between those who are searching and those who are lost. Mary, who is one of its founders, ‘always looks busy, almost too busy to stop.’ O’Hagan describes Mary’s pragmatic attitude: she is not overly concerned with why people go missing, with what their missing-ness might mean on an existential level. She is interested in practical solutions, to finding people and – if possible – helping them back on to a more secure footing. O’Hagan admires her strength of purpose and practical approach, whilst freely admitting that for him, this is only half of the story. That story, in fact, is what obsesses him, what keeps him coming back. ‘Kids had been snatched off the street, while other kids played around them, and adults went on their way. Those who notice the missing will say, now and then, that nothing could ever be the same again. And neither it could, not for anyone. We must accept that we can be changed by things we don’t understand.’
The Missing concludes with O’Hagan’s recollections of the West case, with the incredible scenes he witnessed in 1994 as police began excavating the gardens and cellar of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, with neighbours of the Wests charging journalists hundreds of pounds to rent rooms with a view of the garden, ‘£1 to use the toilet, £3 for a bacon sandwich.’ The atmosphere around these events is as thick with horror and disbelief as ever, yet even at the time, O’Hagan becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fact that for all their understandable fascination with the case, most journalists were far more interested in ‘what happened’ than in who it happened to. For the most part, the women who had been killed by the Wests remained faceless, ‘victims’ rather than people. O’Hagan does everything he can to remedy this, teasing out information about the women’s stories and personal backgrounds. His account of the years Fred West spent living in Glasgow, where he made a living driving an ice cream van, takes on a quality of the uncanny that is scarcely bearable: it turns out that West began his career of abuse just down the road from where O’Hagan was born.
Perhaps the most shocking moment in this long chapter comes when O’Hagan interviews Liz Brewer, one of the many transitory young women who spent part of their youth living in the West household and whose best friend at the time, Shirley Anne Robinson, was one of the nine whose remains were discovered at 25 Cromwell Street. For Liz and the other women like her, the West household was chaotic and often unstable but was perceived by them at the time as safer than the places they had escaped from. ‘You know something,’ Liz said, ‘I would say that some of my years in Cromwell Street were among the happiest of my life. The stuff that’s come out has wasted those years. People have said, “How could you live there?” but you know, if you were someone who’d been on the road, someone who was a bit lost, it could be like a security. Many of us wanted to belong to this, an extended family.’
No words could better convey the contradictions and cruel complexities of a situation that had as much to do with the failings of wider society as with the Wests themselves. Liz Brewer’s words are impossible to forget, all the more so because the lesson that is in them has still to be learned.