The Book of Lost Things

Hodder (2007)
ISBN: 0340899492
$19.95
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Reviewed by Angela Slatter, June 2007

“High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the loss of his mother. He is angry and he is alone, with only the books on his shelf for company.

But those books have begun to whisper back to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in the myths and fairytales so beloved by his dead mother he finds that the real world and the fantasy world have begun to meld. The Crooked Man has come, with his mocking smile and his enigmatic words: 'Welcome, your majesty. All hail the new king.”

Allow me to be upfront about this: I am a John Connolly junkie. Yes, I'm one of them, those who wait impatiently for his new book to come out. I'm on the mailing list. I buttonhole people and demand to know if they've read Connolly and if not, why not. There it is, I've nailed my undies to the mast, so to speak.

Why am I so fond of him? Several reasons: I've never taken to one of his books with a red pen after finding spelling mistakes; his grammar is generally wonderful, his turn of phrase lovely and lyrical (interesting for a man who generally writes about serial killers and nasties from the other side of the dark veil - then again, he's Irish); he plots and paces beautifully; and he scares the living daylights out of me. If one of his books could make a decent gin and tonic, I'd marry it.

Connolly is best known for his Charlie Parker series; in a delightful piece of Irish logic, it was going to be a four part trilogy. The sixth part is coming out this month … let's just regard them as two trilogies and be done. In between the Parker books, he's furnished us with Bad Men (essentially a ghost story), and Nocturnes (a collection of short stories embracing everything from evil clowns to possessed children to sexy vampires who like gardening). In fact, Connolly always plays with the spooky stuff: Every Dead Thing (simplistically described as a 'serial killer novel'), introduces Parker's ability to see the unfairly dead (i.e. murdered folk, including his wife and daughter); Dark Hollow has at its heart a fairytale fear of ogres and dark things that hide in (and worse, come out of) the forest; The Killing Kind, The White Road and The Black Angel all develop an idea from the apocryphal Book of Enoch (one of those parts of the Bible set aside as 'untrue') that a legion of banished angels fell to earth after they defied God, and still roam the earth fomenting strife amongst mankind. Perhaps re-loading fairytales was the next logical step.

With The Book of Lost Things, Connolly digs deep into the universal archetypes embodied in fairytales the world over (China has a version of Cinderella even older than the European tale; there is an Aztec version of White Bride, Black Bride). David, the protagonist, has inherited his love of books and fairytales from his recently deceased mother. His father remarries with unseemly haste - he has managed to get the skin-as-white-as-snow, lips-as-red-as-blood, hair-as-black-as-ebony Rose (the administrator of the hospice where David's mother breathed her last) up the duff. The new family moves to Rose's crumbling family mansion outside London.

It's mid-World War II, David's father is busy working on the Enigma project. Rose (who tries to befriend the resentful David), has her hands full with new son, the fractious Georgie. No one seems to have time for David, who also feels that if he accepts Rose he is betraying his mother. While he's not actively obstructive, David has a great range of passive-aggressive behaviours.

Next, David begins to pass out for no good reason, which leads to a series of visits to a psychiatrist. David has also started hearing books talk - a fact he wisely chooses not to share with the shrink. There is a great scene in his psychiatrist's office when the books talk about their owner:

“Charlatan!”

“Poppycock!”

“The man's an idiot!”

“One book, with the name “Jung” engraved on its cover in gold letters, grew so irate that it toppled itself from the shelf and lay on the carpet, fuming” (p.26).

In Rose's house, David is given an attic room, filled with old books, many of them containing old versions of fairytales: the unvarnished ones where children do get eaten by wolves, are lost in the forest never to return, and where real mothers (not stepmothers) mean their children harm. Some of the books in David's room belonged to Rose's uncle, Jonathan Tulvey, who disappeared when he was fourteen. His adopted sister, Anna, also disappeared and their bodies were never found, nor was any trace of where they had gone, or been taken.

The characterisation of the ancient, now largely obsolete books in David's room provides this gem: “The books that held this old knowledge had never come to terms with this diminution of their worth … A great book that claimed that the end of the world, based on a close examination of the Bible, would occur in 1783, had largely retreated into madness, refusing to believe that the present date was any later than 1782, for to do so would be to admit that its contents were wrong and that its existence therefore had no purpose beyond that of a mere curiosity” (p.32).

David's relationship with Rose grows chillier, his blackouts continue, the sinister Crooked Man comes calling and one night, David hears his mother's voice telling him she is alive but trapped in the other land, the one David visits during his blackouts. David slips out of the house and finds a way between the worlds, through a crack in the sunken garden, into a land where stories will find a way to be told. One of the great things about The Book of Lost Things is the idea, both intriguing and threatening, that books and stories have a will of their own.

On the other side, the kingdom is in decay - the King is old and has lost control of his subjects. The land is being over-run by strange creatures never seen before. The worst of these are the “worse-than-wolves”, the Loups, the result of a coupling between a kinky Little Red Riding Hood and a wolf. Although they speak, walk upright (when not hunting), and dress in ragged finery, the Loups are covered in fur, with wolfish features and appetites. Unlike ordinary wolves, they are cursed with a very human urge to rule. David is saved from becoming an hors d'œuvre for the Loups by his first 'helper', the Woodsman. The Woodsman is a dispenser of tales and shares his stories with David - these are versions of traditional fairytales, which have become (or been) reality in this land of lost things. When the Woodsman falls by the way, his place is taken by the knight, Roland, also a helper figure and a tale-teller. All the stories supplement David's own knowledge of fairytale lore and are designed to help him cope in his new environment, to use his wits and stay alive.

In his travels - with two goals: to save his mother, and to see the King whose famed Book of Lost Things may hold the key to David's return home - he meets a host of fairytale characters who are familiar but stretched out of their usual shape; same, same but different. There are the seven homicidal, socialist dwarves, ordered by the court to continue looking after a very unpleasant, very overweight Snow White. In an effort to stop her eating them out of house and home, they attempted to poison her with an apple, but were found out. David learns that Goldilocks did not get off lightly after her B & E [1] job on the Bears' house. There's the Huntress who, having visited the Island of Dr Moreau and read the Grimms' Three Army Surgeons, splices children with forest animals then hunts them for sport (PMS will do that to you). Hansel and Gretel find out that drugs really are bad for you, thanks to a narcotic gingerbread house (Just Say No). Beauty and the Beast make an appearance, with a twist. There's an old-fashioned, nasty great marauding wyrm, which Roland and David defeat in a less than St George-ish fashion. Roland is seeking his beloved companion, Raphael, who went off on a quest to free an enchanted princess of the Sleeping Beauty type. They find her thorn-embraced castle, from which David's mother calls to him. All through this, the Crooked Man appears and reappears, alternatively helping and taunting David.

When David finally arrives at the King's castle, he finds no safety there. A new king is needed, a deal has been struck and the King and the Crooked Man are less at odds than it at first seemed. The truth of the Book of Lost Things, the fate of Jonathan and Anna, the origins of the Loups, all are played out in the final chapters, and David must decide what price he is willing to pay to get home again.

The Book of Lost Things takes to the dark road travelled previously by such luminaries of the re-loaded fairytale as Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue. The path less travelled by is still scary, shadowy, lined with thorns, and haunted by nasties re-imagined and re-made by Connolly's fertile imagination. The story is well-constructed, the narrative flows logically. The Book of Lost Things is a different kind of read, a fairytale for grown-ups - not in the manner of an Enron Profit & Loss Statement, but as an exploration of the things we love, lose and long for, and of the sad child who resides in every adult heart. Buy it, read it. You know you want to.

'Deeper meaning resides in fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.' (Friedrich Schiller)

Connolly has one of the cooler websites, go see! www.johnconnolly.co.uk

[1] Break and Enter - Ed