The sight of a red coat swishing down a gothic alleyway; a suddenly empty supermarket aisle; the glistening surface of a swimming pool after hours. All these arresting images have one thing in common: they belong to stories – Don’t Look Now, The Child in Time and The Missing – with a missing or dead child at their centre. Through novels, films and television these narratives seize on our worst fears – but what lies behind their terrifying surface?

In cultural artefacts as in life, the missing child is rarely given the liberty of a stable identity: after the initial, brutal drama of disappearance, a wave of emotional and psychological complications rush in to fill the space left by the agony and terror of loss. Quickly, the child becomes a cipher for more deeply rooted and amorphous anxieties about our ability to protect and to keep frequently unforeseeable dangers at bay; about the family’s relation to society as a whole; and about the fear of the unknowable, predatory other.

In Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time, published 30 years ago, and now to appear on our television screens in an adaptation starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald, an obsessive quest begins, a marriage disintegrates and the nature of time itself is put under scrutiny. Fiction always reflects the society in which it’s created – even historical fiction, supposedly invoking other, lost worlds – and The Child in Time is a product of not only the Thatcher era but of a period of intense interest in what science was telling us about the mutability and unreliability of the universe. Late in the novel, Stephen, the distraught father of a vanished daughter, has a moment where he glimpses through a pub window his parents as a young couple, a few weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Obsession … Benedict Cumberbatch in The Child In Time. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/Pinewood Television/ Sunny March/ BBC

The scene reinforces the degree to which the pain of a child’s loss revives other pain, other losses. It is also an example, often in evidence, of the grieving father driven beyond obvious rationality – seen on television in James Nesbitt’s character’s desperate search for his son in The Missing, and in Broadchurch, in which a child’s murder gradually leads to his father’s almost complete breakdown. These are fathers compulsively returning, metaphorically and literally, to the scene of the crime, refusing to be deterred from their search for either their child, or some ungraspable form of justice and reparation.

They stand in contrast to mothers, more often seen in these types of drama to retreat and to go through a process of intense grief, and then a form of acceptance and reconstruction; there may be a new relationship, or some form of vocational work. The obvious gender roles come into play: a man must step up, whether to extreme action or actual violence; a woman’s job is to ensure continuity, the functioning of the remaining family unit.



That’s not to say that the narrative is not frequently disrupted or subverted; think, for example, of Winona Ryder’s gloriously wild portrayal of a frantic mother in Stranger Things, stringing fairy lights all over her ramshackle house in an attempt to communicate with her missing son. Or of Laura, played by Julie Christie in Nicolas Roeg’s terrifying 1973 film Don’t Look Now, roaming Venice and attending séances with weird sisters, while Donald Sutherland attempts to get on with restoring a church.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Message from beyond … Winona Ryder in Stranger Things. Photograph: Netflix

But the prime example of the man on a quest must surely come with John Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers, based on a novel by Alan Le May. Its power derives partly from the fact that its hero John Wayne is not the missing girl’s father, but her uncle – at a distance from the core family unit. A veteran of the American civil war and the Mexican revolutionary war, Wayne’s Ethan Edwards returns to west Texas shortly before Comanche Indians murder one of his nieces and abduct the other, Debbie. The search that follows takes many years and, naturally, touches on many themes; the extent to which Ethan is motivated by the idea of retrieving what is “his” from the other, the brutalising effects of the conflicts he has previously seen, the fearthat Debbie, if alive, has been appropriated by another culture, and will not be able to reintegrate with her own. We are given the impression that Debbie’s sister has been raped as well as killed, with the implication that Debbie might also be suffering a continuing violation – possibly a worse scenario than her death. Debbie’s desires, when she is finally located, do not come into it; nor does the violence perpetrated on Native Americans. The film’s immense power derives from the idea of Wayne’s relentlessness, his refusal to surrender to what has happened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Power … Natalie Wood, John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers, 1956. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

One might contrast this with Sebastian Barry’s much acclaimed novel Days Without End, in which two soldiers fall in love with one another and, with a young Sioux girl they meet on their travels, form a close family unit. But their bond can only exist against the narrator’s awareness that their adoptive daughter is not with her own family; that for them, she is a missing child.



The children, missing and dead, that recur throughout culture are frequently used as mirrors to parental attitudes, and function as a sort of free-for-all for viewers and readers to judge and to project their own fears and fantasies (this happens, as we know from the cases of Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews, all too readily in real life). In some cases – as in the second series of The Missing, and another television drama, Thirteen – the issue becomes frighteningly fundamental: could you recognise your child if you hadn’t seen them for many years? Could an impostor take their place and fool you?



Naturally, such trauma also places relationships of all kinds under immense pressure – and will often reveal and reflect hidden contours. The long, complex, elaborate psychological dance of friendship that makes Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Quartet so hugely gripping and rewarding moves through decades of Lina and Lenù’s lives: their early upbringing and family lives, their aspirations, marriage, motherhood, work. As much as a portrait of a friendship, it is also a highly patterned and symbolic depiction of rivalry, emotional attachment and the formation of identity.

The two protagonists’ lives as mothers are a key part of the book: each of them in some sense, “fails”; marriages go by the wayside, connections are lost. There are times when each is called upon to support the other, sometimes in the business of child-rearing. So when a child becomes lost while in the care of its not-mother near the end of the series, we are immediately transported back to the very beginning of the quartet, when Lina and Lenù search for their lost dolls in the terrifying bowels of their tenement. Issues of blame and control pulse through the story, together with the sense of irreparable damage, a rip through the fabric of life.



It’s a stark difference with another kind of mother entirely: the heinous Brenda Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. She commits perhaps the greatest parental transgression of all when her son, John Andrew, is killed in a riding accident. When the news is conveyed to her, she momentarily believes that her lover, also called John, is dead when the truth is revealed, she utters the memorable – and unforgivable – words, “Thank God!” It is hard not to see Brenda, awful though she is, as a woman punished for licensing her sexual desire, firmly placed by Waugh beyond the pale.

Of course, there are occasions when a child is missing, or dead, but not to us. Susie Salmon, the narrator of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and of the subsequent film of the same name, is one such character – murdered by a neighbour, she is positioned in a sort of limbo from which she watches over her family, and also over her murderer. It was a bold narrative move that both shocked and compelled readers and viewers, raising as it did fascinating questions of the usefulness of vengeance and the imperative to rebuild.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Imprisoned … Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson in the 2013 film adaptation of Room. Photograph: Alamy

Similarly, Emma Donoghue’s Room brings us face to face with a woman abducted while still almost a child, and then kept imprisoned, along with the child her abductor has fathered by raping her, in a tiny room. The shocking twist at the heart of the book – mother and son’s escape and the extreme difficulties they encounter in adapting to the outside world – suddenly bring the story into a wider focus, juxtaposing both the missing and the missers.



And finally comes a novel that – if the bookmakers are correct in their predictions – might see American writer George Saunders lift this year’s Man Booker prize. Lincoln in the Bardo follows Willie Lincoln, son of the US president, into the world of the nearly dead, where his story is told by a variety of its inhabitants. Filled with wit and sadness – and above all the babbling voices of those unable to process through the “bardo” and proceed to the afterlife – it is an immensely powerful work. And it also lets us know that, in the hands of the right imagination, the horror of individual loss can become an extraordinarily humane exploration of the beauty and the value of life, however painful.