BOOK REVIEW: THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

I loved fairy tales when I was young. Fairy tales, ancient legends and horror. And a huge dose of anything Enid Blyton. These were the staples of my reading diet as a primary school pupil. If you, like me, also like fairy tales, then this is the book for you.

John Connolly may be more famous for his Charlie Parker private detective series of novels but his 2006 The Book of Lost Things is a totally different kettle of fish. The Book of Lost Things is set during World War II and centres around David, a twelve-year-old boy. Not long after David lost his mother who died after a long illness, his father remarried a woman Rose whom he met in the hospice where David’s mother had stayed and a new half-brother came along, further displacing David from his old life, a golden age which he came to associate with his dead mother, domestic bliss and carefreeness.

Probably because of his unhappiness, David began to change. He started to have seizures during which he would pass out. The only thing was during the periods when he was knocked out, he didn’t really lose consciousness. He would have visions of a strange world and he knew that because vignettes of his hallucinations would return to him when he was lucid but these tattered fragments made no sense to him.

Another eerie change was that he began to hear the chatter of books. Yes, books talk. And the tone and content of their conversations depend on the contents between their covers. David was worried and frightened by these weird changes but there was no one he could talk to because his father was occupied by his efforts for the war and trying to adapt to the new family, and David’s relationship with Rose was highly antagonistic.

In the midst of these confusing and frightening changes, David was transported through a portal in his garden into a strange world, the world which he had seen during his seizures. In this world, David came across woodsmen, knights, kings, wolves, trolls, monsters, fairy tale characters and most menacingly, a man called The Crooked Man, who was stalking David for his own nefarious purposes.

Where was this strange world that David was trapped in? What did The Crooked Man want from David? Who was the King of this world and would he really be able to help David to return to his own world or was he in cahoots with The Crooked Man? Pick up a copy of the book to find out the answers.

In the first half of the book, the author put a lot of effort into crafting his words, intricately showing David’s fear when his mother was ill and his grief when she died.

Here is an example:

The boy, whose name was David, did everything that he could to keep his mother alive. He prayed. He tried to be good, so that she would not be punished for his mistakes. He padded around the house as quietly as he was able, and kept his voice down when he was playing war games with his toy soldiers. He created a routine, and he tried to keep to that routine as closely as possible, because he believed in part that his mother’s fate was linked to the actions he performed. He would always get out of bed by putting his left foot on the floor first, then his right. He always counted up to twenty when he was brushing his teeth, and he always stopped when the count was completed. He always touched the taps in the bathroom and the handles of the doors in a certain number of times: odd numbers were bad but even numbers were fine, with two, four and eight being particularly favourable, although he didn’t care for six because six was twice three and three was the second part of thirteen, and thirteen was very bad indeed.

The paragraph above paints a heart-wrenching picture of a boy desperate to save his mother. But he did not know how to do so and so he invented a meaningless, almost superstitious, routine to give courage and hope to himself. The writer did not have to tell us David was frightened, confused and sad. We can see from David’s actions the depth of his love for his mother and hence the fear and grief that he was going through.

One word of warning: in the second half of the book, maybe because Connolly was running short of time or he was simply in a hurry to finish the book, the language becomes less thought-out and more mundane. Although the language was no longer as exquisite, Connolly is a competent writer and the average student would still be able to learn something from it.

What makes this book an interesting read is Connolly’s subversive take on well-known fairy tales like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, The Goose-Girl, Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood. These are only the more famous tales in the story; the book includes several other fairy tales that Connolly re-imagined and re-wrote.

Connolly’s re-workings of the fairy tales are darker and definitely more adult in theme than the Disney version that most children are familiar with. Snow White was humorous but half the jokes would be lost on children who don’t have prior knowledge of class struggles. Many of the tales are scarier than the sanitised versions that we find on film and in books these days. Sleeping Beauty was more a horror tale than a love story and Beauty and the Beast was both creepy and sad. Red Riding Hood was dark and twisted and definitely not suitable for young readers.

On the whole, the book follows the familiar structure of the quest. David was brought into a strange land where he had to overcome various challenges and obstacles to win a throne. In the course of the quest, he matured a lot; he entered the strange land a boy but by the time he left, he was definitely on his way to becoming an adult. Thus the book is actually also a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story.

When I read the book, Pan’s Labyrinth – the critically acclaimed and commercially successful film by Guillermo del Toro – invariably comes to mind. Both deal with youths going on a quest and triumphing over the various challenges that they came across. Both have the same awful final test. Both protagonists were offered a kingdom but the price they had to pay was the blood of their half-sibling; even the true test behind the apparent price was the same. But Pan’s Labyrinth was consistently excellent from the beginning to the end whereas, as mentioned earlier, I find the quality of the first half of the book to be superior to the second half. This is not to say that The Book of Lost Things is lousy; it may not be excellent, but it is still a worthy read.

If you like fairy tales, or have a particular interest in reworked classics, then this is just the book for you.

Recommended for readers 13 and above

Rating: 3.5/5