Missio by Tim Roux Reviewed by Clive Ashman

Thirty-six years ago, at the height of the West's Cold War with the then Soviet Union, a Hull fishing trawler called The Gaul and its thirty-six crew suddenly disappeared in the freezing waters of the Barents Sea, off the cost of Norway. Hundreds of miles from home, and hundreds of feet down, the fate of the missing vessel and its lost crew continued to haunt their grieving relatives and the whole City of Hull for the next thirty years (and Stevie Francis).

Not until the British government sent out a Norwegian survey ship, The Seisranger to investigate the sinking and those espionage-based conspiracy theories which had surrounded it, could even some of these ghosts be laid to rest by the bereaved back home.

Missio is the new novel by Tim Roux that's woven out of these emotions. Its author lives and works hundreds of miles away, in Brussels, but nearly all his ten novels since are in some way haunted by his home town of Hull; and none more so than this one. Missio is about a small boy and his women; their cat, a judge and a magician; but born out of this bigger mystery. Missio in Latin is about a sense of letting-go; a release, an ending; but little Stevie Francis cannot. Five years old when his Dad goes down with The Gaul but not much older when he starts seeing him again; in night time conversations which prove just first installment of Stevie's wider gifts as seer.

Gifts which come to shape his later life and those in the fishing communities around him in more and stranger ways than any of them - save Stevie - could ever have imagined.

Missio is a beautifully produced soft back of quality paper and design that falls to hand as no ebook ever could. Tim Roux's earthy narrative and his dry, philosophical asides lead its readers into an overlooked world surviving to this day, where traditional values and spiritual phenomena still happen.

A story of how belief is still possible; even in the blighted urban heart of communities robbed of their living and of that dignity - and those terrible griefs - which a lost way of life once so unfailingly brought them. Published by Xlibris - Feb. 2010 Link: Missio

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