An adventurous escape from the real world
I HAD always thought that John Connolly was purely a thriller/mystery writer with a touch of the supernatural, having enjoyed many of his Charlie Parker series and the quirks that he always includes. When I picked up The Land of Lost Things I was expecting a racy thriller. Imagine my surprise when I entered the world of adult fable and found myself falling into an unexpected rabbit hole …
Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault were all part of my childhood. I do remember being a bit scared sometimes but there were lessons to be learnt, perhaps subliminally, but always imaginatively and with clear and engaging characters. The differences between right and wrong, good and evil marked in a young mind. Folklore merging with the real world, parables or metaphors, they made their mark.
The stories that emerge in this brilliantly imagined novel are complete with illustrated opening letters in each chapter (sadly not illuminated) and old English/Anglo Saxon/Norse/ Gaelic/Japanese and chapter headings that express the writer’s love of words. It took me a while to get into – a switch into a new genre – but when it clicked I could not get enough of it.
Connolly has a prequel to this novel – The Book of Lost Things (2006) which deals with a young boy, David, whose mother dies when he is young and his entry into the world of folk and fairy tales in dealing with this loss. In The Land of Lost Things we are introduced to Ceres, single mother in the “real” world whose 8-year-old daughter Phoebe is badly injured in a road accident and is comatose.
At the doctor’s suggestion she is moved to a facility, Lantern House, better equipped to deal with patients in this state. It means that Ceres will return to her childhood home and the memories of her father who was obsessed with folklore.
On the estate is an old house which belonged to a writer whose one publication, The Book of Lost Things had seen great success. David was the protagonist, the Crooked Man, a malevolent character, one whom she had unknowingly brought into a story she had told the comatose Phoebe. A story that she did not know she knew.
When the ivy starts creeping maliciously into Ceres’s cottage and a oneeyed rook keeps appearing she is drawn to the author’s supposedly haunted house. An attic door that opens before her … talking books, insects as large as Ceres’s hand and the blood red ivy forever creeping and changing – a sinister companion. As reality starts retreating and Ceres starts running it will be to an alternative world Elsewhere, with characters and adventures that mystify, captivate and frighten.
Dark and magical we enter this world of Dryads, the Huntress, Rapunzel, harpies, giants, trolls, war, mayhem, a Woodsman who becomes Ceres’s protector, and a journey to find lost children taken by the Fae. And it is these lost children who are perhaps the metaphor for Ceres loss of Phoebe and her trying to bring her back to consciousness and life.
As an Irishman I suspect that Connolly has more than his fair share of mythical characters in his mind. It seems so and provides an entertaining, if sometimes harrowing read! He explores the liminal zones with magic rolling off his pen. This is a rollicking good tale that will have you biting your nails and then processing the messages. It is a book about parenthood, being a mother, the bond between mother and daughter and bringing back lost children. Creative, brilliantly constructed, surprising and so full of adventure that you’ll drag yourself back to the “real” world.