Forgetting Zoë.

An Uncompromising Novel of Alarming Power

It’s the ultimate nightmare, imprisonment. But in the case of Zoë Nielsen it was not just another bad dream: it happened. She was 10 when it all began, when she had the bad luck to fall within the gaze of Thurman Hayes, a man living out his own horror story. Set in the US, Ray Robinson’s third novel draws on real events in a narrative of alarming power. Among the most impressive voices of Britain’s younger generation, Robinson is an uncompromising witness.
Each of the major characters in Forgetting Zoe is thoughtfully examined in turn. Their motivations are partially revealed; the rest is left to the reader, as Robinson is too skilled to offer easy judgments. It is interesting to see praise from Jim Crace included on the book jacket: one would have to look to Crace’s Being Dead (1999) to recall a British novel as convincing and as calmly aware of its own menace, its ambivalence. Also of note is that Robinson has achieved something that has consistently evaded British writers, with the possible exception of Jonathan Raban: he has evoked an authentic sense of the US, particularly in the sequences in the Arizona desert.

Thurman Hayes is more than a monster: he is a damaged psyche tormented by his father’s cruelty and his mother’s dangerous passivity. “Father scratched his weather-tanned neck. His grin was a challenge . . . Thurman was almost fifteen years old and claimed to have an upset stomach. Father said that if he was staying at home then he had to help him out on the ranch, you choose. When Father looked into the rhyme of Thurman’s face it was obvious he hated what he saw: his own weaknesses, his failings.”

The boy is numb, wrung dry and emotionally paralysed by his father’s presence. On discovering the girlie magazines that his father has kept hidden, the boy gazes at them. “But no matter how long he stared at the images, he failed to feel a thing.” The boy has begun to sleepwalk through life, or so it seems, merely watching.

From the outset Robinson imposes Thurman’s disconnected personality on the narrative. Equally compelling is the elegantly cryptic prose, complete word pictures emerging from single sentences: “The slam of the front door; the sound of Father’s pickup revving: tires.” (This is interesting: a British writer, having set his novel in the US, is using US spelling.) For Thurman the sight of his father’s hands “only ever spoke one word and that word was hurt”.

One could almost begin to feel sorry for Thurman, the only child of aging parents. He speaks in an old-fashioned, mannerly way; he seems diffident. But the evil is there, seething away in the form of all the slights he has ever suffered.

Meanwhile, across the continent, on Unnr Island, in northern Canada, an imaginative little girl is searching for happiness. Zoë is another child who has never had it easy. Her mother lives in a state of self-absorption. “Ingrid. Never ‘Mom’ or ‘Mommy.’ ” Within a short sentence Robinson reveals volumes about the relationship between the mother and daughter. When Zoë goes missing Ingrid begins to look for her. The search of the cottage leads Ingrid into every possible hiding place. “The silence of the house never seemed so loud.”

Eventually the mother checks the child’s room. “She stood looking at the straw crosses above Zoë’s headboard, to protect her from the trolls, the men of the Underworld. Her unmade bed of ruffled pink sheets. Moppy, her stuffed bunny, and the drawings on the walls. Had Ingrid ever spent this long in her daughter’s room just looking?”

No trace of the child is found. There are no clues. Ingrid continues to search, “Zoë’s body in her mind, bobbing in slow sea-time.” People run out of sympathy; they talk about her behind her back: “There’s that Ingrid Nielsen. She still thinks her daughter’s alive.” The child’s father, Jon, a Norwegian sailor with whom Ingrid had a brief romance years before, returns to help find the child. But he leaves, and being alone proves too much for Ingrid.

Robinson has written a thriller: he summons the menace, the devices, the details, the way pieces fit. Above all he looks to the way in which people respond, and how they forget, once the novelty wears off and they return to their own lives. The public as much as the criminal is on trial here, albeit a detached, non-judgmental trial. Robinson is studying the jailer and the captive; Thurman is trapped by his own madness. The real tragedy is how the ordeal shapes and distorts Zoë. For her the torment becomes the familiar; ultimately she needs Thurman.

For Zoë survival settles into an ongoing game of cat and mouse; the characterisation of Thurman is precise and unsettling. The brutality is shocking, yet subtle such is Robinson’s eerie compassion. He sustains the pace and the psychological intensity, as well as, most importantly, the ambivalence. The older, now-grown Zoë retreats into anonymity, behind a shield of abrasive asides, deliberate weight gain and tracksuits. Freedom becomes another ordeal.

A strange little episode near the end of the novel says, as do so many of Robinson’s elliptic observations, so much. Zoë, having admitted that her life was also ended when her captor died, is staying at a hotel. A birdcage is hanging in the courtyard. “She opens the door to the cage. ‘Go on. Fly. Be free.’ But the bird just sits there.”

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

‘Robinson provides intense, concentrated portraits of his two landscapes…[He] begins to shatter us with brief, snapshot views of a little girl trying to make sense of her life in an underground bunker…Robinson’s skill lies in what he doesn't say: physical abuse of Zoe is implicit but he provides scant detail, focusing instead on exploring how she adapts to her situation…This is a story of hell told without judgment…It’s a thriller which doesn't need to resort to breakneck pace, a crime novel without a detective, a misery memoir with much of the misery left to the reader’s imagination. Unsettling and troubling, despite its title Forgetting Zoe is a novel which will be hard to forget.’

Alison Flood,Thriller of the Month, Observer

'STOCKHOLM syndrome" is the name given to "the psychological condition in which hostages identify with their captors' political or personal causes, even to the point of justifying their crimes or taking part in them. The syndrome's name comes from a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, in which several hostages gave support to the robbers." (Brewer's Dictionary of 20th Century Phrase and Fable)

This is a curious but understandable condition, intelligently and vividly explored by Ray Robinson, whose first novel Electricity was nominated for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Authors' Club First Novel Prize.

It opens on a lonely ranch in Arizona. Thurman Hayes is the dysfunctional son of a dysfunctional family, bullied and beaten by his half-crazy father who has built a nuclear bunker below the ranch house. Thurman is a victim who becomes a victimiser; we know from the start that there is something rotten in him, and soon find that he is a criminal as well as an oddity, though one with certain up-to-date technical expertise. After his mother's death he makes a trip to her childhood home, an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, and kidnaps a ten-year-old girl on her way to school. She is to be his prisoner and his plaything and will spend years living in the bunker, occasionally let into the open air, but always kept under restraint.

Thurman is a psychopath in that other people's feelings do not impinge on him at all. He is incapable of any empathy or even sympathy. Self-gratification is all that matters. So he cannot even imagine the misery he inflicts on Zoe's mother. It is a measure of Ray Robinson's own sympathetic imagination that he makes Thurman credible as a human being and not merely a monster (though he is of course a monster). He shows with great skill how Zoe becomes emotionally dependent on him even while for years she pines for her mother.

The action moves between Arizona and the Canadian island, and the atmosphere of both places is very well conveyed. Ingrid, the mother, experiences the guilt as well as the grief which seems to be usual among parents of lost children. Robinson shows how, in such a predicament, reason ceases to operate. Ingrid is not in any way responsible for her daughter's abduction. Yet she never ceases to blame herself. There is no possible comfort, even when Zoe's father, a Norwegian sailor, returns for a time. She receives support from friends, but the support is always inadequate. Loss and pointless guilt combine to destroy her. This is not the least of Thurman's crimes. Being what he is, it means nothing to him.

Zoe does. She is very quickly essential to his sense of self. He abuses her and pets her. His need for her is intense, and, deprived of everything else, she comes to believe that she is indeed part of him as he is of her. She longs to escape, but is afraid to do so. When she is eventually free of him, she finds she is still bound to him. She doesn't know who she is otherwise. You can't just wipe out eight years of your life, not like that. She can't erase Thurman from her being. She may do so in time, but she will never forget she was his "dream", the instrument by which he tried to make sense of his wretched life. Revenge and escape can't wipe out what has been.

Ray Robinson is a writer with keen observation. His prose is hard, abrupt and sinewy. He abstains from judgment, content to present his characters in action, though also ready to enter into their minds. The novel is a study of obsession, but also of the inadequacy of obsession: Zoe is in the end stronger than Thurman. We are left with the realisation that eventually she may make sense of her life as he never could.

It's a novel that starts as an ugly and nasty story – and the ugliness, the cultural nullity of Thurman, is never forgotten – but ends up by being moving and even tender. This is partly because Robinson shows us goodness co-existing with evil and outfacing it. It is also because he refrains from forcing a verdict on the reader. Thurman is a mess, a sad apology for a human being; nevertheless he is a human being. It is a novel that contains violence but also stillness, that reveals more than it makes explicit. I assume that Ray Robinson is a young man, but this is a mature and accomplished work.

Allan Massie, The Scotsman

Remember Her Name

This could well be the best American novel of the year.

And it is written by a bloke from Yorkshire.

A ten year old girl is abducted from a small island off the coast of Newfoundland. She winds up in a converted nuclear bunker beneath an isolated ranch in Arizona.

Her captor, Thurman Hayes, is a troubled young man who has been on the receiving end of a deeply unpleasant upbringing. He subjects Zoë to an horrific and prolonged ordeal. These are not nice things that are going on.

The book is in three chunks. It kicks off in Arizona, giving us a glimpse of Thurman's family life and what may have driven him to such a terrible crime.

It then jumps to Newfoundland, covering the periods before and after Zoë's disappearance, although it doesn't actually dwell on the abduction itself. And finally, we return to the ranch where Thurman keeps Zoë under lock and key.

This is going to seem odd given the difficult and uncomfortable subject matter but Forgetting Zoë is a beautiful book. Disturbing, certainly, but very very beautiful. It swept me away with its haunting prose. The aftermath of the abduction is particularly moving stuff. And the way the author has captured the cadence and style of American writers is quite frightening. He is one hell of a talented writer. The bastard.

Ray Robinson has a remarkable skill for conveying hard content with grace and a light touch. His first book, Electricity, managed to get inside the mind of a young woman with epilepsy. His follow up, The Man Without, featured a transvestite who was partial to a bit of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Both are stunning novels that rightly received considerable critical acclaim.

Forgetting Zoë is his best yet. I would be very surprised if you don't find it gracing some big literary prize shortlists in the year ahead. It is banker for my top ten of the year and I suspect many of you will think the same thing once you have read it.

It is published in June. It is worth the wait, believe me.

Scott Pack

The missing child of Ray Robinson’s novel has been abducted. ‘Inspired by real events’ it says at the beginning of Forgetting Zoë. The real event is obviously the abduction in Austria of Natascha Kampusch. Zoë, like Natascha, is ten when she’s abducted and imprisoned in a bunker, only escaping when she’s 18. Is this faction? An imaginative re-telling? Maybe both.

Thurman Hayes, who abducts Zoë, is nothing like what we came to know of Wolfgang Priklopil. The latter was often described as a nonentity. Hayes has killed his father and murdered a girl before he kidnaps Zoë. Nor does Robinson’s novel take place in the suburbs of Vienna. The story moves between a ranch in Arizona where Hayes keeps Zoë in the bunker, and an island off the coast of Newfoundland, where Zoë’s mother, Ingrid, endures not only the devastating loss of her daughter but public sympathy turning to suspicion.

Robinson is good at landscape. The bleakness and wildness of these settings add to the mood and intensity of the story....

What makes this an impressive novel is the vividness of the writing — such memorable turns of phrase as ‘the snap and drool of the press pack’ — and the exploration of the frightening and fascinating bond that develops between captive and captor. Robinson’s Electricity was described as ‘an eviscerating debut’. Forgetting Zoë is uncomfortably mesmerising.

Diana Hendry, The Spectator

I read FORGETTING ZOË with great pleasure, admiration, and envy. What a writer. The characters are so sharply drawn they're etched into the page. It's admirable the way that Ray describes with equal intensity two such different landscapes. He's using language like thick oil paint; you read and are inside the world being described. Captivating. A great storytelling achievement.

Tim Pears

Ten-year-old Zoe Nielsen is kidnapped from her island home off the coast of Newfoundland, kept in a bunker underground for eight years, her life erased. Her mother crumbles. Her abductor, Thurman Hayes, blossoms.

Cases such as Josef Fritzl's imprisonment of his daughter Elisabeth, the kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch in Austria, and of Sabine Dardenne in Belgium, have taken up reams of newspaper coverage and been written about in endless true-crime retellings. Now novelists are starting to tackle the issue: later this summer Irish author Emma Donoghue takes it on in Room, in which five-year-old Jack has spent his life in a tiny room with his mother, but first Yorkshire-born Ray Robinson gives us his exploration of Stockholm syndrome in the quiet but throbbingly disturbing Forgetting Zoe.

This is Robinson's third novel - his debut, Electricity, was nominated for two prestigious literary prizes. We are presented first with Thurman's own abused childhood in the squinting heat of the Arizona desert, the buzzards and the chollas and the dust; yes he's shown to be a monster, but he didn't spring from nowhere, fully formed.

Then it's Zoe's turn, the last few weeks before she's kidnapped, and the contrast of her upbringing in the Canadian coolness couldn't be greater; the "island heartbeat" of the lighthouse, the "skither of snow" that falls, the "distant hish of waves dying against the beach", the poetry of the ice-filled rain, "skeins of the stuff sticking to the glass - a sleepy sound". Robinson provides intense, concentrated portraits of his two landscapes, perhaps enjoying slightly more the cold, northern light of Unnr Island.

Then Zoe's gone and, as her mother Ingrid falls apart, Robinson begins to shatter us with brief, snapshot views of a little girl trying to make sense of her life in an underground bunker. "Those never-ending days below. Her memories were being eaten away by the silence and so she hummed to herself to remind her whose skin she was in," he writes.

"The man removed weeks, months." Zoe's sense of herself disappears. The first time he smiles, "the captive suddenly became captivated...she began to covet his attention and her past was silenced a little bit more". Years pass.

Robinson's skill lies in what he doesn't say: physical abuse of Zoe is implicit but he provides scant detail, focusing instead on exploring how she adapts to her situation, "craving his company, his touch. Hating herself for it". How she learns, in her own way, to manage Thurman, and how, years later and strangely bereft, she struggles to make sense of a world devoid of the man who ruled her own for so long.

This is a story of hell told without judgment, leaving the reader free to infer what horrors they will, and to apportion the blame which Robinson declines to. It's a thriller which doesn't need to resort to breakneck pace, a crime novel without a detective, a misery memoir with much of the misery left to the reader's imagination. Unsettling and troubling, despite its title Forgetting Zoe is a novel which will be hard to forget.

Alison Flood

‘[Robinson] is very good at cleaving to the consciousness of these characters, one of whom is very ignorant, one of whom is very young... [writing with] great psychological conviction, great conviction of place...’

Kevin Jackson, Radio 4

 

‘[Robinson’s] northern landscapes a very evocative... you feel the cold and the wind and the rain... powerfully done.’

Tom Sutcliffe, Radio 4

‘So sick, so dark, so twisted but so good. A disturbing tale about the abduction of ten-year-old Zoe Nielson. Horrified as you’ll be, you won’t be able to put it down before finding out if she escapes.’

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