Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon review – crime, comedy and old-age confusion

In a care home for the elderly, a woman draws strength from a mysterious friendship in an attempt to recall past secrets and prove her sanity“I’m almost sure that yours was the first hand I ever held.” Eighty-four-year-old Florence Claybourne’s childhood friend Elsie accompanies Florence through her life at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly, offering wisdom and support when both are in short supply. What would Florence be without Elsie? It’s unthinkable. She is as close as the air Florence breathes, or closer; abiding when all else falls away. Even during Florence’s solitary and catastrophic fall, which opens and closes the novel, the presence of Elsie is revealed.Cannon’s bestselling debut, The Trouble With Goats and Sheep, centred on a missing woman. In Cannon’s world, not only people but minds and memories threaten to go missing, and if memory is lost, so is the self. Three Things About Elsie belongs to a tradition of fiction set in old people’s homes or supported accommodation. As in Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, Deborah Moggach’s These Foolish Things and Jill McCorkle’s Life After Life, an elderly group inhabits an enclosed community on a perilous edge, insecurely poised between vitality and death, comedy and pathos. Like M Scott Peck’s A Bed by the Window, Cannon’s second novel involves a mystery plot of crime and redemption. And like Peck, Cannon is a practising doctor, and knows what she is talking about. Continue reading…
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