TELL, by Jonathan Buckley
When someone disappears, a haunting begins for the left behind. Could she have run away for some reason? Might he have been abducted? Could they be dead? Storytellers have found fruitful terrain in these questions, pursuing them in everything from mystery novels to true-crime podcasts that inch episodically toward What Actually Happened.
A problem is that, once the question is answered, What Actually Happened may not merit capital letters: Often, the truth is just sad and simple. But if the storyteller fails or refuses to explain matters, the audience may consider itself the victim of a bait-and-switch.
“Tell,” by the British novelist Jonathan Buckley, offers a slow-burn literary take on the missing-person whydunit, recounted in fragmentary anecdotes. The vanished character is a wealthy businessman, Curtis Doyle, who one snowy January morning drove from his Scottish mansion, never to return. All is told in a single voice, that of a gardener at the palatial estate whose transcribed comments — made to filmmakers researching a movie — constitute the entirety of the novel.
Curtis, we learn, had a rough start, with a deadbeat father and a mother who gave him up for adoption. He rose from shop boy to apparel tycoon, found a beloved partner, had a pair of unimpressive sons, accumulated properties and filled them with contemporary art. Then his partner died, and he suffered a head-on collision in Cambodia, after which he was not the same. Until he was simply gone.
Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale.
A challenge for Buckley is justifying how the gardener could know so much about her aloof boss. In that regard, the novel evokes a British tradition of servants peeping through keyholes. The trope is slightly harder to justify here; keyholes are scarce in a garden.
Buckley — the author of 12 novels, and known for formal experimentation — manages this challenge deftly. Yet the one-voice design grants no direct access to the central character, no booming speeches from Curtis, little evidence of his charisma. He remains obscure.
If you squint hard, you might imagine the TV series “Succession,” featuring another rags-to-riches British tycoon with disappointing children, though Curtis seems like a decent boss, showing loneliness and other hints of humanity. Or you might think of “Citizen Kane,” another search for truth about a lost mogul, told through snippets from his past.
But ultimately, “Tell” is a highly literary work. As the gardener notes: “This isn’t a TV thriller. There’s not going to be any great revelation.”
Buckley suggests his deeper intentions in thoughtful lines woven through the gardener’s remarks. “We have no idea who we’re living alongside in the minds of the people we’ve met,” she says. “We’re characters in hundreds of different worlds.”
Later, she reflects on our tendency to retrofit memories to outcomes. “Like when you take a photo of something from a distance, and things look closer to each other than they are in reality,” she says. “We make a story of it. It’s something we need to do. There has to be a buildup.”
The buildup in “Tell” is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge — no splash heard, just the fading ripples of “why.”
TELL | By Jonathan Buckley | New Directions | 169 pp. | Paperback, $15.95
