Missing Things, Never Quite Found (The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly)

Member Name: Puggers

Product:	The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
Date:	23/02/09 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Neat concept, some clever sections

Disadvantages: Doesn't quite come together, weak ending

While fairy tales and fables are the influence behind great swathes of modern fiction, there seems to be little recently published work which would be happy to be called such; in many ways, they seem to have gone out of fashion. In The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly both borrows heavily from the extensive realms of fairytaledom and attempts to create something closely related to a traditional fairy tale, fleshed out and expanded into novel form. All the classical elements are here, and many of the original characters - we have a quest for a castle and a king, fearsome beasts and sturdy allies and a liberal sprinkling of Snow Whites, Red Riding Hoods and creations of Brothers Grimm.

Our protagonist is a young boy named David, whom we join at the opening of the tale preparing himself for his mother's death. Not long after her passing, his father re-marries, and David moves to the country to live with him and his new wife. Soon a baby daughter is born to the couple, and David begins to feel lost in his own world, a diminishing presence in his home. So far, familiar ground - and here Connolly starts to weave the fairytale world into the narrative. Discovering a crack in the wall of the house's sunken garden, David finds himself first venturing into, and then trapped inside a land beyond that which he knows. The only way home would appear to be held by the elusive King of the land, who holds close to him the titular Book of Lost Things, and understands much of this world and the one David has come from. Of course, the castle is some way away and the road lined with danger and trodden by all manner of creatures, some kindly, some unpleasant and some much worse.

In one sense, this is the journey which the book narrates. This, though, hides a number of other layers which the author encourages us to explore. As much as David is pursuing his apparent quest, he is also on the brink of becoming a young man, and as such is setting out on a journey of growth and expanding awareness.

Alongside these aspects, another dominant theme of the novel is one which explores the female figure, especially as it is perceived by a twelve year-old boy. David has had a number of female role models in his life, from the mother he loved to the stepmother he resents and sees as having stolen from him much of what he held dear. We see his various conceptions of women represented in a number of fabled forms along the way, from the seduction and deceit of the Harpies and Red Riding Hood (whose story is somewhat different to the standard here) to the intimidating physical nature of the Huntress, right through to the lazy, self-centred glutton that Snow White has become. The book uses these various highly stylised, fantastical interpretations of the female form cleverly to represent the numerous facets of David's real-life fears.

This is a recurrent technique the book uses to explore David's juvenile mind. Constantly, we see the concerns that affect his disturbed mind realised through fantasy figures and played out on a fairy-tale stage, and we are given to understand that as he overcomes these obstacles, and moves closer to the culmination of his quest, so he moves nearer to a state of happiness, security and acceptance of the world he belongs to.

For David certainly is a disturbed child - the book is set amongst wartime Britain, and our protagonist's personal traumas (the loss of a mother, his alienation and apparent displacement in his family) are all compounded by the stresses and strains placed on any family coping with war. The book, for all its fairy-tale influences, is not an altogether pleasant one, full of frightful characters and actions and a consistently sinister tone. Arguably, this has always been a part of the traditional fairytale, but where Disney has gone some way to brushing off the nastiness and generally jollying up the tales, this is very much the uncut version - this isn't really a children's book, such is the content.

As a fairytale reworking, this works, broadly. There are some nice updatings and clever redrafts of what we have come to accept about some well-known characters, and the story has all the classic elements put together adeptly enough. However, the author goes for something more than that here, attempting to mix together fantasy and allegory with a more grounded, realistic story. This, though clever in theory and promising in concept, only sporadically works in The Book of Lost Things. It's hard to pin down why it doesn't quite come off, but the two sides of the story never really gel together as they should, and though some of the representations of reality in the fantasy world are apparent enough, it doesn't feel like the two have any impact on each other, providing an unsatisfying story. Additionally, the ending is disappointing, and spells out too strongly what could have more effectively been left to the reader's interpretation of what they've just read.

This is an interesting effort, and does provide some effective moments, but just falls short of working as a whole. Nonetheless, it's a laudable attempt, and there's plenty to admire within it - and you get a nice collection of original fairy tales as an appendix to the story, which is a neat touch and offers a chance to spot some of the influences behind the story that you may have missed. The Book of Lost Things is worth a read, even if it isn't quite what it wanted to be.

Summary: An ambitious attempt at updating the fairytale genre falls just short.