Thriller set in Chengdu, China (“the city where the sun never shines”)
- Book: Half the World Away
- Location: Chengdu
- Author: Cath Staincliffe
Every parent’s nightmare…..
Lorelei (Lori) heads off to South East Asia for a backpacking adventure – and ends up in China. It’s not hard for her mother Jo and stepfather Nick to keep in touch in the era of the internet, she regularly blogs about her travels and experiences, so everyone can follow her journey. A familiar family scenario.
But soon the posts dry up, causing a ripple of concern initially but, hey, these young folk get distracted and involved in what they are doing. It’s normal. But as days turn into a couple of weeks, the anxiety rises and Jo turns from Nick to Tom, Lori’s biological father. This of course adds strain to the floundering relationship between Jo and Nick…
Together, Tom and Jo decide they must set out for Chengdu (pronounced Chungdu) in Sizuan Province, China, where Lori had settled for a stint of teaching. So they head off from Manchester on KLM and pop up in hugely unfamiliar territory, where the sights, sounds and smells compound their unease. They have solid support and advice from Missing Overseas but the input on the ground is not effusive or really that engaged. Our man in Chengdu, the consul Peter Dunne, is there to help the parents though the formalities and it is clear that the the local police force doesn’t want to see the image of their city tarnished by anything murky or untoward. Resolve and perseverance, really, are the only qualities that are carrying Tom and Jo along, and the whole process feels frustratingly slow. The investigation crawls and this is palpable, the parents largely have to fall back on their own resources to get to the bottom of what has been going on; their daughter is clearly now a missing person.
It is quite sobering to realise that people go missing abroad sufficiently often for charities to be established in order to help locate them and support families and friends back home. Cath talked to the Lucie Blackman Trust (formerly Missing Abroad) when she was researching the book. It is however all too clear that the wheels of bureaucracy run excruciatingly slowly in real life – and in the story Jo and Tom clearly have to push as hard as they can to find out the fate of their missing daughter.
Chengdu provides a superb, hot and chili soaked backdrop to the heart stopping search for Lori, and clearly Cath renders it as a vibrant and at times oppressive place – the people mill as the parents endeavour to crack through the wall of foreign-ness with which they are confronted… feeding carp with baby bottles, or discovering that 20% of the world’s computers are made there, or bike riders wearing their jackets back to front….
A gripping read.
This review first appeared on our blog where we chat to Cath about writing and China, and she features her personal photos taken in Chengdu.
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