FFWD Weekly
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Wordfest by Lachlan Mackintosh After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell Review, 372 pp. "The day she would try to kill herself, she realised winter was coming again." This is the opening line, printed in bolded black, of Maggie O’Farrell’s impressive debut novel. In After You’d Gone, O’Farrell creates the beautifully brash Alice Raikes, and in the first 10 pages has her step in front of an accelerating car. While she lies in a coma – and these passages are written with an eerie drowning calm – her past overlaps with her present struggle toward independence and love. The transforming moment in After You’d Gone occurs in the Edinburgh station Superloo, where Alice "saw something so odd and unexpected and sickening that it was as if she’d glanced in the mirror to discover that her face was not the one she thought she had." Halfway through the book the reader discovers that this glimpse contains much more than first imagined. Meanwhile, Alice has fallen deeply in love with John Friedmann, the only hitch being his obstinate Jewish father who will not acknowledge his son’s gentile girlfriend. Fathers play an important role in O’Farrell’s novel, and as is the case with many of the flashback passages, their significance is not fully felt until the novel’s final section. By the end of the book, the "you" who is gone in the title has actually become both of O’Farrell’s star-crossed lovers. After You’d Gone reminded me of another brilliant debut – filmmaker Milcho Manchevski’s Before The Rain. In it, a harrowing circle of actions past and present point to a destiny beyond any character’s control. And the reader, or in this case the viewer, feels the depth of loss by understanding exactly what has come before it. O’Farrell does this for Alice Raikes and John Friedmann, and the reader closes the book with a melancholy feeling perfect for these disappearing autumn days.

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