Feature: Books - The Vanishing of Ruth by Janet MacLeod Trotter
Published: 12 May, 2011
by MAGGIE GRUNER
IT’S 1976 and a busload of lively passengers is on the hippy trail to India. But in Afghanistan in icy November the “rainbow” tour darkens when two of the party, co-driver of the bus Marcus and 20-year-old Ruth, go missing.
Cut to the present day, and Ruth’s niece, Amber, is attending her grandmother’s funeral in County Durham.
After meeting a journalist who investigated her aunt’s unsolved disappearance, Amber begins her own voyage of discovery. It finally takes her to the heart of the mystery in Janet MacLeod Trotter’s gripping new novel, The Vanishing of Ruth.
Sales from the book are helping to raise funds for the care of the author’s brother, former Guardian journalist Donald MacLeod, who suffered brain injuries in a road accident (see right).
The novel’s split time frame means the story alternates between the 1970s and the present. Sights, sounds and atmosphere of the overland journey eastward during the 1970s are vividly evoked. For those who experienced such a trip, descriptions will doubtless spark nostalgia.
The novel offers a taste of the simpler travel of that time, before the overland route to Kathmandu was closed by revolutions and wars.
The author reaches further into the past by using extracts from Victorian and Edwardian travel books at the start of chapters written from the perspective of Juliet, a character who has a passion for the books and imagines herself the reincarnation of an Edwardian traveller.
Juliet hopes the 1976 overland bus journey will enable her to meet an old friend of her father, whose plane had crashed in a remote mountainous region many years earlier.
Her fellow passengers include Americans, Australians, Scots, Irish, and New Zealanders. Among the motley travellers moves the enigmatic Marcus, a man not what he seems to be and, of course, the vulnerable Ruth.
The linchpin is bus driver Cassidy, arguably the novel’s most likeable character, who falls for Juliet.
Back in the present day, Amber tracks Cassidy to an allotment in Newcastle. He helps her by relating his memories of events at the time when Ruth and Marcus disappeared – a disappearance which Amber’s father thinks was murder, although police believed it involved a suicide pact.
With Amber, Cassidy eventually makes another, modern day journey that drives the novel towards revelation of its final secret.
Author Janet MacLeod Trotter, whose previously published books have included 13 historical novels, herself travelled to Kathmandu as an 18-year-old on an overland bus.
She says: “I wanted to recreate the excitement and camaraderie of the overland route – it was always much more than a hippy trail – and of the appetite for experiencing other cultures.”
The Vanishing of Ruth is dedicated to her “big brother Don who came through the snow to greet me at the airport after I got stuck in Delhi – much love. Hold fast.”
• The novel is available through: www.janetmacleodtrotter.com It should also be available for order through bookshops and on Amazon, and is an ebook.