The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly. Hodder & Stoughton, 310pp,£12.99
You sure shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and in John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, that goes for the book within the novel as well as the novel itself.
The cover art and jacket copy (". . . loss of innocence into adulthood . . . the enduring power of stories in our lives . . .") vaguely suggest an old-fashioned, reading-is-good-for-kids lark along the lines of The Chronicles of Narnia or The Neverending Story. Could Ireland's dark master of the serial killer saga be going all wholesome and family friendly? No way. Mature teens will no doubt dig it, but The Book of Lost Things is no kid's book. The author may be experimenting in a new genre, but the book's epic villainy, mournful tone and tested morality is the essence of Connolly.
Since his debut with the startlingly grisly Every Dead Thing in 1999, Connolly has earned a good living with his five (to date) Charlie "Bird" Parker thrillers, which follow a melancholy New England private eye who tangles with assorted sadists and psychopaths from both this world and the next. It may be that he's found the formula increasingly constricting: beginning with The White Road, the fourth book, Connolly opened up the narrative so that action wasn't told exclusively from Bird's sanctimonious point of view. He did away with the first-person altogether in Bad Men, his first non-Parker, a vicious revenge thriller that reads like something cooked up between Stephen King and Jim Thompson. He followed that with the surprising Nocturnes, a superior collection of short supernatural stories, many of them in the traditional English mode of MR James, but also including a tense, tight Parker novella. His last Parker to date, The Black Angel, is perhaps the least satisfying, admirable in its scope but too-often plodding in the plotting.
Given that children in Connolly books are usually victims, the first surprise in The Book of Lost Things is his hero: a 12-year-old boy who could almost be Bird as a child - if the detective had grown up in 1930s England. The boy, David, is grieving the shattering death of his mother after a long illness. War is in the air, and David’s father is a code boffin working for the military to penetrate German secrets. He’s well-meaning but distant and hopelessly grounded in the world of facts and logic. David, however, has inherited from his mother a fondness for fables and fairytales. “While he loved his father it would be true to say that he loved his mother more. He could not bear to think of a life without her.”
Things only get worse for poor David when his father remarries and they move out of Luftwaffe-besieged London to the relative safety of the new wife's old family house. David's stepmother, Rose, tries her best to be kind and understanding, but times are tense, she's pregnant, and soon David has a baby stepbrother to further fuel his resentment.
It's not giving too much away to say that David finds himself transported into another time and place, a strange kingdom that seems to be constructed from off-kilter reimaginings of the fairytales he loved reading with his mother. On his quest to learn the secret of the way back, David is protected and guided by two familiar father figures: a brave woodsman and a gallant knight with a twist. A good thing, since he's constantly in peril from the denizens of this odd world: wolves that walk on two legs and have adopted human traits, including an unbridled lust for power; horrendous harpies from Greek mythology that patrol an impossible-to-cross chasm; an elegant huntress who has mastered the science of surgically fusing humans and animals together in order to hunt the most dangerous game; and a nightmarish great beast with the body of worm and the face of - ugh! anyway - that terrorises a besieged village.
Worst of all is the Crooked Man, who ranks with the Travelling Man, the Collector and even Mr Pudd among Connolly's most memorable villains. The Crooked Man is as old as the world and would seem to be known by many names, including Rumpelstiltskin, but in reality he's Connolly's version of the Devil, maintaining his immortality by exploiting the bottomless moral weakness of men and women. In the somewhat arbitrary way of most fantasy, the Crooked Man has so many days to corrupt David by tempting him to betray his baby stepbrother. If David resists, the evil one will cease to exist.
This bare-bones outline hardly does justice to Connolly’s heavily allegorical, wholly individualistic take on been-there, read-that material. The writing throughout is laconic, slightly formal and characteristically unflinching in its depiction of violence and gore, though both have been ratcheted down quite a few notches from the excesses of his previous novels.
The Book of Lost Things is peculiar and perverse and humane, with an incredibly lyrical finale that, I blush to admit, brought a lump to my throat. The novel should earn the author new readers, though whether his thriller fans will go along on the fantastical journey remains to be seen.
