The Book of Lost Things

Every morning of his mother’s illness, 12-year-old David carries a copy of Grimm’s fairytales and a comic book from his bedroom and places them just so on his favorite kitchen chair, hoping that this routine will ensure his mother’s survival for one more day. So begins “The Book of Lost Things” by John Connolly, a story as poignant as it is imaginative and chilling.

The book begins in London just before the bombings of World War II. Young David is reeling after the death of his beloved mother. Confused, depressed, and without a channel for his grief, David retreats into this world of books – for it is through their shared love of reading that he feels closest to his mother. David’s mother tells him that stories are alive, but “without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they have no real existence in our world. They are like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.”

As David’s grief grows deeper, he begins to have seizures, and hears his mother telling him she is still alive and calling him to come rescue her. At the same time, he starts to hear books talking to each other and catches glimpses of a mysterious “crooked man.” When the real world and the fairytale world of David’s imagination overlap, he must decide whether he wants to return to his imperfect life or stay in the fantasy land forever.

Connolly is best known for writing thrillers, and his experience in the genre is palpable in every heartbeat of “The Book of Lost Things.” Unlike the innocuous Disney fairytales of the 20th century, Connolly reaches back to something more akin to an original Grimm brothers’ tale. His book is not for the faint of heart – giant oozing worms, death by impaling, and trails of blood abound. One of my favorite characters David encounters is a huntress who fuses human heads onto animals’ bodies to make the chase more interesting.

“The Book of Lost Things” serves as a strong reminder of how fairytales, though recorded centuries ago and relayed orally generations before that, continue to have an overwhelming impact on our society. Folklore and myth echo some basic primal instincts that remind us of our shared human experience. In his book, Connolly combines legends from various sources, including references to Greek mythology, and reaches back to some of the stories’ earliest versions – the well-known (Sleeping Beauty, Snow White) and the lesser known (Childe Rowland, The Goose Girl).

I was disappointed by the rushed, deus ex machina ending and one painful foray into humor, but the ideas and tone of the rest of the book more than made up for its imperfections.

“The Book of Lost Things” ties into so many levels. Whether it is subtly providing commentary on modern life or reading like an edge-of-your-seat adventure, it is in essence “about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.”

One word of advice: read the book alongside the “Behind the Scenes” section of the Web site www.thebookoflostthings.com, where Connolly describes the origins and influences behind each portion of the book.

Haley Stocking is an English senior with a minor in theatre. She can be contacted by email at hstockin@calpoly.edu.