I hardly dared hope that such an old mystery, where most of the protagonists are dead and those that aren’t remain tight-lipped, would be solved. Cumming’s achievement is in doing so whilst also writing a profound and beautiful book ... In telling two tales – that of her mother’s childhood and her own story of how the truth was eventually unravelled – Cumming illuminates the darkness of secrets, shame and betrayal and their effects in a riveting book.
... [an] enthralling book ... How to notice details that others have missed is another of Cumming’s skills, and she develops it while investigating her mother’s mystery ... For her and her mother, art is common currency, and they give famous artworks private meanings ... A lesson the book teaches is how greatly ordinary things matter, even the humblest ... New evidence about the crime with which the story starts keeps emerging until the last page. By the end you know more than you could ever have guessed about all the actors in the drama. But On Chapel Sands is much more than a search for truth. It is a moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life. In short, a masterpiece.
...a deeply felt, forensic yet ultimately empathetic examination of human motivation and its attendant sorrows, which is as much a social history of the early 20th century as it is the story of one family and its secrets ... [Cumming's] intermeshing of art, time and memory is superlative ... The repercussions are interrogated by Cumming with a hungry precision up to her last, revelatory pages.
The drama of Betty’s disappearance makes a brilliant opening chapter ... The book is a series of revelations: one twist the reader may foresee early on...but most come out of the blue ... in the absence of oral or written evidence other than her mother’s, [Cumming] relies on images to interpret the past. She does it skilfully, teasing out memories where none exist ... The book is a love letter to her mother, whose warmth, articulacy and survival instincts shine through. It’s also an intimate portrait of a village community, with its storybook characters ... The nostalgia is tempered by an awareness of how repressed and small-minded village life could be and, as people drown in dykes or go missing at sea, how prone to calamity; in spirit and setting, On Chapel Sands is more like Graham Swift’s Waterland than Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood...
Cumming’s parents were artists. Cumming herself writes on art, and her narrative turns to paintings to illustrate its crises ... After the silence is broken, the fragments pieced together, a void remains at the heart of this exquisitely wrought story of maternal and filial love and loss. It is in images — two photographs taken by George, for much of the narrative a domineering and repressive figure — that Cumming at last finds the missing piece: a redemptive moment of grace that unites the child and her fractured family.
...it is when Cumming turns her acute gaze on pictures from the family photo album that On Chapel Sands unites the strands of her work in earnest. Faded snapshots are sifted for clues as though they were both paintings and evidence. The book becomes a meditation on family, art and time ... On Chapel Sands is a mystery solved through empathy and interpretation. It feels as if this is the book Cumming has been working towards, a deeply personal story but one that also draws on practised skills as a critic and a writer. It is perfectly balanced between the requirements of its narrative and the expression of its author’s passions. It is a moving tribute from a daughter to her parents and grandparents. It is beautifully written.
The mystery of Betty’s provenance is the enigma that keeps the memoir’s pulse tickings ... When the story strays far from Betty and along minor twiglets of the family tree, it can become somewhat meandering, like a stranger telling you at great length at a party what their great uncle got up to at the turn of the century, when you’re dying to get to the bar. However, Cumming skilfully withholds key twists in the tale, revealing them at just the right moment. There are surprises, but no shocks. Her prose is too elegant for such gaudiness — composed and restrained, but empathetic ... Cumming intuitively refracts the natural world through art — on a crisp day, the Chapel beach is as crystal clear as a Seurat painting; on a windy day it whorls into a Turner. Nonetheless, more jokes and madcap characters would have livened up proceedings. From the microscopic details of her family history, Cumming wisely pans out to reflect on bigger ideas — the composition of personality, the origins of artistic impulse ... beautifully written ...
... one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years, a book with as many twists and turns as any mystery, a family history of great emotional resonance ... strong and graceful writers...combines richly layered narratives and descriptions ... Perhaps that love is what makes this book so compelling, it bestows a kind of grace that allows, in the end, for no villains ... an extraordinary story, and an even better book.
Five Days Gone by Laura Cumming is a passionate and poignant story about a search for five days in her mother’s life ... Cumming, an art critic, journalist, and author, has a grasp of the language that flows through a number of twists and turns that the story takes. Cumming’s curiosity forces her to follow even the smallest of crumbs, determined to learn about her mother’s abduction, and further still, the secrets of her birth ... Five Days Gone is a book that is hard to put down. Even the side stories prove to be metaphors of the life of a little girl who grew up without a past. It is a satisfying ending to a curious mystery.
Sensitive, tender, elegiac, quietly mysterious, and as much the work of a thoughtful, informed imagination as of historical fact, the book profits from Cumming’s keen ability to extract meaning from the most seemingly casual of photographs. This is also a model of how to write a compelling biography of the childhood of an 'ordinary' person. Memoir and biography lovers will be riveted.
Cumming...deftly tells the story of her mother Betty's childhood abduction in this latest work ... The use of photographs and art assist readers in visualizing the story and add depth to the characters ... With its unique combination of artistry, investigation, and memoir, this story is likely to appeal to a wide range of readers and is recommended as a general purchase for large collections.
The facts of the story and their resolution command attention, but in the end, they’re less interesting than the author’s process of thinking about them. As she looks at photo albums with the eye of a scholarly detective, she discerns patterns of gaps and absences ... Her nuanced, pensive account restores reality and vitality to figures from out of the past, making them meaningful while uncovering their secrets. A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie’s mill.
...[an]intense family history ... The book sags a bit in the middle as Cumming teases the core mystery, but the final third reads like a thriller. Questions and lies abound in this touching book about a daughter’s quest to help her aging mother uncover her true identity.
