Lost Property, by Laura Beatty
JOE BRACE
Lost Property
‘At a midpoint in my life, I found myself in a dark wood.’
From its opening line, Lost Property establishes its intent to anchor its search for meaning and identity firmly within a European literary tradition and engage with its leading lights. The unnamed narrator, a middle-aged writer like Beatty herself, packs up her belongings, buys a camper van and sets off on a journey of self-reflection ending with a spell volunteering in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Chios.
Over the course of the narrator’s journey across the European mainland, she encounters and debates with historical figures from Christine de Pizan to Eustace aux Gernons (a Norman knight and companion of William I). What the dark wood represents, apart from a loss or obscuring of identity, is presumably Brexit, euphemistically referred to here as an ‘elective insularity’. Resistant to the simplifications of ideology and suspicious of laissez-faire cynicism, the narrator hopes that the evocative places she visits will provide the lens she needs to re-examine her understanding of herself and her place in history.
She begins her grand tour in Boulogne, driving south through the Camargue to Marseille, then east and over the Alps. She skims through northern Italy before crossing the ex-yugoslav states, visiting ancient Thrace and the Greek islands. She travels with her partner, Rupert (patient, knowledgeable, handling the driving), who functions as both a Hermes-like psychopomp and a wry foil to some of the narrator’s headier flights of fancy. From the passenger seat, she diligently and exhaustively researches the landscape they pass through and excavates interesting information for the benefit of Rupert and the reader. This, along with being stuck with UHT milk in France and inedible stew in Serbia, brings a comforting familiarity to anyone whose Continental ramblings have been accompanied by equally meandering explorations of Wikipedia.
The ghosts the narrator encounters are manifestations of this research, the figures too vivid to be summarised briefly. They appear in their places of significance to provide summaries and defences of their lives, to refute or mock the narrator’s approach to them. Eustace comes to represent everything cynical, mercantile and rapine in the history of men’s relations. D’annunzio calls for blood and glory. Ariosto offers hope, but skilfully avoids clarity. Chancellor Rolin, encountered at Beaune, is one of the more nuanced figures, with whom the narrator has a long-running, complex debate about the limits and functions of power and responsibility. Joan of Arc and Isabella d’este are opposite poles of blind but potent fanaticism and oppressive, manipulative self-interest. A carpione in Lake Garda asks only if mankind is yet ready for extinction. The book never specifies in what liminal zone these encounters take place. Are they generated purely by the narrator’s research and subconscious projection, or do they have autonomous drives and opinions of their own? Some are visible to Rupert; others are not.
To add to the complexity, the narrator is often intimidated by these ghosts, holding back from what she really wants to say to them and on two occasions fearing physical violence. The only two on whom she really turns are Philoctetes (groaning and stinking on the Lemnos ferry) and Gavrilo Princip, who is shouted at like a promising student who has deeply disappointed. (‘What have you done, Gavrilo Princip? You’ve started the First World War.’)
And, of course, in the physical background to the whole piece is the refugee crisis, the ‘swarm[ing] ant-like shapes’ and ‘shadowy columns’ moving over the Alps towards Dover. Are they as lost as the narrator, or might they have an uncanny sense of where the world is heading? What do the shades of the Somme, Solferino and Sarajevo know about where we came from?
Beatty offers no easy solutions but a meditation on what was and what might be again. As Ariosto says, ‘Keep trying. Nothing lasts.’