What Was Lost: A Novel
by Catherine O'Flynn
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Book Reviews of What Was Lost: A Novel
Book Review: Achingly Sad but Amusingly Funny Story of Loss
Summary: 4 Stars
1984, Birmingham, England. Kate Meaney is the sole proprietor and lead detective for Falcon Investigations (assisted by her top secret assistant Mickey the Monkey, a stuffed animal). If Falcon Investigations had an advertisement, it would read something like this:
FALCON INVESTIGATIONS
Clues found. Suspects trailed. Crimes detected.
Visit our office equipped with the latest surveillance equipment.
Being only 10 years old and with limited transportation, Kate performs the majority of her detective work at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping center. Virtually ignored by her grandmother (her mother abandoned her when she was small and her beloved father died of a stroke not too long ago), Kate is free to spend hours trailing suspects at Green Oaks and observing the goings on in her neighborhood. One of her few friends is Adrian, the older son of a local shopkeeper and one of the few grown-ups who take Kate seriously. At school, Kate keeps mostly to herself until she befriends Teresa, a new girl who doesn't always do things by the rules either. Unfortunately, this fledgling friendship and Falcon Investigations comes to an abrupt end when Kate disappears without a trace.
Fast forward 20 years and we meet Kurt, a security guard at Green Oaks shopping center. Lonely and adrift in life, Kurt is startled to see a young girl appear on the mall's surveillance cameras after-hours. Yet no trace of the girl is found; she seems to be a figment of Kurt's imagination. Kurt is haunted by the girl and ends up teaming up with Lisa, the assistant manager of the record store in the mall, to figure out who the girl is and what happened to her.
Like Kurt, Lisa is also lonely (despite being in a relationship) and stuck in her life. She is haunted by the disappearance of her brother Adrian, who was suspected of being involved in Kate's disappearance years before and fled home to avoid media scrutiny. Realizing that the girl on the video may be Kate, Lisa teams up with Kurt to conduct their own after-hours investigation in Green Oaks--hoping to solve the mystery of Kate's disappearance and remove the cloud of suspicion from Adrian. Along the way, Lisa and Kurt begin to forge a fragile connection, which is shaken when their investigation begins to bear fruit.
I loved this book! It has the most interesting blend of humor intertwined with sadness. Almost everyone in the book is lost and adrift in their lives except for Kate--who has purpose and drive to spare. O'Flynn does a brilliant job of creating fully realized characters. You get inside the heads of Kate, Kurt and Lisa, and I so enjoyed my time there--even though I often found myself simultaneously laughing and filled with aching sadness for them. Even Green Oaks becomes a character of sorts--becoming a menacing and almost evil presence in the story.
Although there wasn't nearly enough of Kate in the book (and the reason for my not giving it 5 stars ... I guess I want to punish the author for not giving me more of Kate!), I was entranced by this story from the very first page until the last. O'Flynn does a brilliant job of tying everything together in a way that was both satisfying and realistic. It was hard for me to believe this was O'Flynn's first book. She is a true talent (as evidenced by this book winning the Costa First Novel Award), and I await her next book anxiously. Do yourself a favor and read this book! It is filled to the brim with all the good and bad aspects of the human existence. Books like this don't come along very often so don't miss it.
An Excerpt
There were always fresh flowers on these graves, along with stone teddy bears and faded dolls. Among them was the grave of Wayne West, a boy Kate remembered vaguely from Infants One, who had somehow put his head inside a plastic bag and suffocated. Every year he was remembered in prayers at school and in mass, but Kate always wondered if he had really died that way. It seemed such a convenient cautionary tale. Kate was waiting for the day that the teachers would present some blind boy in assembly who had lost his vision when someone had thrown a snowball with a stone in it. The school had already had a talk from a boy with one foot who had lost the other playing on the railway tracks. Kate had a gruesome image of teachers from competing schools bidding for injured children at a local hospital and ascribing a range of childhood misdemeanors to them. "I've got a paraplegic little girl here, ideal for stamping out leaning back on chairs." "How about this almost-blind boy, ideal for carrot promotion."
Book Review: Jolly Olde England? Har, har, har!
Summary: 4 Stars
It's 1984 in Thatcher's Britain, and a ten-year-old girl -- an odd, lonely, already alienated child -- is absorbed in fantasies of crime and surveillance, an obsession that seemingly leads to her shocking disappearance, followed by the disappearance of a young man who had suspiciously befriended her.
And then it's twenty years later, and several people whose lives the little girl touched are all working in a mega-mall called Green Oaks, where surveillance is keener and more invasive than anything George Orwell predicted. And that's all I mean to say about the narrative of this first novel prize winner.
The England of 2003, presumably the author's England, is unimaginably depressing -- pathetic and apathetic, podgy, stodgy, and dodgy -- a realm of social and occupational culs-de-sac, walled-off and forgotten corridors and storage rooms in a monster mall of super-stores, where the customers and employees compete in surliness and futility, a mall which inexorably encroaches on all that's left of a shabby once-upon-a-time. The anomie felt by all, ALL, the named characters of the narrative is echoed at the end of each chapter by the whines and snarls of anonymous visitors to the mall. This is the grimmest picture of Life in our consumer society that I've ever read, made all the more grim by the fact that it's written from within, not by an intellectual or a poet or a Martian but by a working-class girl from Birmingham who may well have spent the larger part of her life so far in the Mall. Suicide, alcoholic escapism, couch-potatohood, and gaping idiocy are the full range of options in such a life, though outside the Mall there is also the lurking alternative of skinhead depravity and random destructiveness. I'm glad I live in another time and place.
This is not a completely coherent novel in terms of genre. It begins in the style of a book for "Young Readers" -- for ten-year-old girls, to be precise -- but when the time-zone changes to the future, it quickly assumes the tenor of a pop mystery, replete with scatology and snarky humor. The language is too 'foul' and the mood too dark to make it a book most parents would give their children for birthdays, but then the narrative is followed by a "Reader's Guide" and two pages of utterly smarmy "Questions for Discussion"!!! Do teenagers in the UK sit in classrooms groaning inside themselves while they chirrup dutiful 'reflections' to their hapless, hopeless teachers? Or do socially desperate grown-ups buy this book on the recommendation of Oprah, read half of it, and then sit down over glasses of cheap Sauvignon Blanc and try to impress each other as too bright for present company?
This is an artless book, one that reveals more than its author ever intended, and for that reason all the more powerful, like a painting by a psychotic in an institution that rivals van Gogh or Kokoschka in intensity. I wonder where the author, Catherine O'Flynn, has left herself to go; has she written herself in a corner or will she break out of Green Oaks Mall as she sketchily permits her two protagonists to do? In any case, I'm grateful for the recommendation, from another denizen of Amazoo and his daughter, which led me to read "What Was Lost." I just hope I never wander into O'Flynn's realm of surveillance.
Book Review: A truly satisfying read/
Summary: 5 Stars
If one definition of a chinese takeaway is a meal that leaves you wanting something more after half and hour, then " What was lost" by Catherine O'Flynn is it's antithesis. A profoundly simple story, set in a shopping mall, detailing the story of a child who disappeared and the effect of this on surrounding lives, " What was lost" can be read in a single sitting. But it stays with you for days afterwards, with its blend of mystery, humour, fiction and ghost story. It is a deeply satisfying read.
" What was lost" is set in one of the new shopping malls that have sprung up all around England, replacing churches, industrial sites, high streets and social clubs- the only place in many cities where people actually congregate. The novel moves between two time periods - 1984 and 2004. In 1984, Kate is a quiet, well-behaved, curious ten-year old child who dreams of becoming a sleuth and opening her own detective agency. She visits the Mall frequently, carries out detailed surveillance of `suspects' and writes her notes in a book. One day, she simply disappears. No body is ever found.
Twenty years later, Kurt, a security guard recovering from the death of his wife and struggling with narcolepsy, sees Kate's image on one of the Mall surveillance cameras. His struggle to uncover what happened, and why he should have seen her image, forms the central story. His story intersects with that of Lisa, who knew Kate as a child because Kate and her brother, Adrian, were friends. Adrian was twenty-two and has always been a suspect in Kate's disappearance. Unable to stand the constant suspicion, he has also disappeared. Not as completely as Kate. He keeps in touch, secretly and only once a year, with Lisa.
Behind the story, there is a masterly ( and very funny) exploration of the present-day life as an on-going reality show in which we are all actors, eternally being watched or watching on screens big and small. The mall, with it's production `frontage' of fake palms, atriums, cafés, and fountains, creates a seemingly glamorous set for people to walk around in, fantasizing about their dream life. The workers backstage, meanwhile, struggle with terrible conditions in subterranean corridors like so many rats in a maze. When staff and customers finally interface, in Ms. O'Flynn's masterly hands, fireworks result.
There are lots of secrets in " What was lost". As Kurt and Lisa piece together what might have happened to Kate, they disturb a myriad of old, accepted stories and uncover many well-kept secrets. In the end, the search for truth has both complicated and upset their lives, but it has also enriched them immeasurably.
There are no easy answers but this wonderful book consistently pays tribute to curiosity instead of voyeurism and urges us to continue to question the world around us.
Highly, highly recommended.
Book Review: "The key problem with Green Oaks was the gulf between conditions for customers and conditions for staff."
Summary: 4 Stars
O'Flynn's seemingly effortless novel has a cumulative effect, a simple tale of people drifting through life with no center and scarce ambition. At the heart of all is young Kate Meaney, a self-styled private detective who spends her days tracking the activities of imagined suspects. In the UK in 1984, ten-year-old Kate blends in with the crowd, a stuffed toy in suit and spats, Mickey the Monkey, her constant companion. Terribly lonely since the death of her beloved father, Kate has fashioned an imaginary life, complete with detailed notebook and identity kit. Her only friend, Adrian, a young man of 22, works in his father's shop and enjoys Kate's vivid imagination as she describes "the Gentleman Embezzler, the Henchman and the Ruthless Assassin". Her favorite haunt is Green Oaks, the local mall, hub for employment, shopping and a temporary reprieve from boredom. Then one day, Kate goes missing, Adrian the last person to see her.
In 2003, Adrian's sister, Lisa, plods daily to a tedious job at Your Music in Green Oaks. Like other employees, Lisa is restricted to the dark warrens of employee access, far from the more attractive mall facilities created for customers. One of many who navigate these halls, Lisa is trapped in a dead end job, living with a man she no longer cares for, waiting patiently each year for the music CD that arrives from Adrian, their only connection since he ran away after Kate's disappearance. Kurt, a night shift security guard, is an equally lost soul, a loner who vaguely yearns for a life beyond his acute personal loss. When Kurt notices a familiar little girl on a security tape- possibly Kate- and Lisa stumbles over Kate's Mickey the Monkey, the two are drawn together, discovering common ground and a past connection that will challenge their plans for the future.
In an age when human commerce often accounts for the only social interaction of strangers, Green Oaks is a repository for failed dreams and unfulfilling jobs, a place where many toil with little inspiration, their lives reduced to eight-hour shifts and brief shopping forays. Diverse characters people this novel, most lonely, disappointed, disillusioned; but hope simmers beneath the surface of even the most banal interactions, Lisa and Kurt recognizing like-minded souls in one another, Kate a frail specter, her disappearance haunting them. Kate's bright innocence and enthusiasm, even in her profound loneliness, is a testament to the promise of youth, when anything can happen. Their early dreams long tarnished, Lisa and Kurt have almost given up, hostages to a predictable fate until they meet, sparking hopes of a larger world that does not leech the soul from dehumanized workers. Sweetly poignant, this novel is fresh and intuitive, a few hours' escape into possibility. Luan Gaines/ 2008.
Book Review: An Emotional read..
Summary: 5 Stars
This book had been on my wishlist for quite sometime. I was finally able to read it and not one moment do I regret it. There are novels that somehow touch your life , and really make you ponder. What was Lost was that novel for me.
In 1984 , Kate Meaney,a 10 year old, with her "top secret" notebook and toy monkey pretends to be a detective. She spends her days looking for suspects. A strange lonely child after her father's death, Kate's world just revolves around imagining crimes and tracking supposed "criminals." Her only friend is Adrian, 22 years old, son of a shopkeeper. Then one day Kate goes missing and Adrian is the main suspect... Almost 20 years later,Lisa, Adrian's sister is working in a tedious job at the local mall which was Kate's favorite place to track "suspects." Lisa is stuck in a job she hates and living with a man she doesn't care about. Adrian sends her a music CD every year as a way of keeping in contact, after he ran away following Kate's disappearance.
What was Lost is an emotional , heartbreaking novel. It deserves all the accolades it got. Kate is such a touching , sweet character. My heart went out to her. Her innocence, her passion and energy , despite her loneliness is moving. She's a lonely sad little child , living in a world of her own making. You can't help but wonder what horrific fate befell this naive child. I felt so sad for her - living in an imaginary world where a toy monkey is her only friend. Instead of being a normal happy child, she spends her days imagining that she's a private detective. Descriptions of her "sleuthing", her notes in her secret diary..make her so endearing. You feel connected with her.
There are funny moments , but mostly "tragically funny", if you know what I mean. As the truth unfolds, your heart will break for Kate. I had tears in my eyes at the end. This book is enjoyable,intriguing, moving and stirs the heart.. Catherine O'Flynn is a very talented author who not only writes fantastically but is capable of moving her readers emotionally.
What was lost is also a satire on modern life and what we all have come to. Its about the futility of our lives and what we do.So many of us are trapped in jobs we hate and relationships that suffocate. Today's age is dominated by consumerism. Loneliness is rampant everywhere. How many of us are actually satisfied with our lives? Most of us go through life half-asleep. What was lost is a novel with great depth.