Customer Reviews

What Was Lost

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

Reading Catherine O'Flynn's debut novel "What Was Lost (WWL)" was a like a breath of fresh air coming after all those much lauded but grossly disappointing titles like last year's Booker prize winner. O'Flynn may be new to the game but she understands the essentials of good writing and what it takes to captivate and hold the reader's attention.

To me, WWL isn't so much a social commentary on the absurdity of consumerism as some have suggested, as it is about the sense of alienation and crushing loneliness afflicting individuals living in our modern age. From little Kate Meaney who lives in her make-believe world of detectives and potential victims, where she sleuths away all day with the help of her pet monkey Mickey, hence unwittingly becoming the subject of the mystery at the heart of the novel, to record store deputy manager Lisa who is stuck in an unsatisfactory relationship with that useless colleague-boyfriend of hers, to the lonely night shift security guard Kurt who nurses a secret and passes his hours gazing into that surveillance monitor of his at Green Oaks shopping mall, etc, etc.

Little Kate's mysterious disappearance all those years ago, her pet monkey Mickey's strange but timely re-emergence in the mall corridor one day, the secrets of the protagonist cast and related characters as they are gradually revealed, and the presence of ghostly ruminations by several anonymous persons after hours at the mall, all add convincingly to the spook factor that turns this quite wonderful and difficult to categorise book into a serious page turner as one works through its final pages.

But what kind of mystery novel is it that brings heartache and tears - the kind one least expects to experience and spill - in a heart thumping, heart wrenching denouement that unites and reveals the central characters in all their humanity. Little Kate's act of kindness that gave her poor underprivileged friend,Teresa a future must count as one of those pricelessly poignant moments that brought a lump in my throat.

"What Was Lost" is altogether more than an ordinary suburban thriller. What O'Flynn has created is a niche offering in a hybrid genre that both unreservedly entertains yet leaves the reader with the feeling that what he has read easily passes for serious literature. It won the Costa First Novel Award and in my opinion beats most of last year's Booker nominees hands down. I loved every moment of it !

When I turned the final page of this book, I thought about how much I liked the story. Saying that, I am giving this 4 stars because I thought there were parts (the middle!) that were a slow-go for me.

Summary, no spoilers:

The book starts out in 1984, and we follow the escapades of 10 year old Kate Meaney. She is a precocious, imaginative, but lonely little girl, who decides that she wants to open up a detective agency with a partner - her toy stuffed animal, a monkey named Mickey. Her only real friends are a rebellious schoolmate, and a young man named Adrian, who lives next door.

Kate decides the best place to scope out the criminals is the local mall, Green Oaks. She spends most of her free time there, trying to spy on the would-be robbers and criminals, copiously taking notes.

The next section of book takes place in 2003, and we know that Kate had disappeared without a trace back in 1984. We learn about the repercussions from that, and we are introduced to Lisa, Adrian's sister who works at the Green Oaks Mall's music store, and Kurt, the security guard there.

I thought the first section of this novel was absolutely riveting, and I just loved Kate. When I got to the second section, I just couldn't get as interested in Lisa and Kurt, and I found myself wanting to hurry on to find out what happened to Kate. I found this whole part of the novel a slow read.

But for that, I would've given this book 5 stars, because the denouement is just fantastic, and poignant. When I was done with the book, I was happy I had read it, and I was very satisfied with the story.

Recommended, and if you find yourself slowing down mid-book, hang in there. There's a big payoff at the end.

This book was so different to anything I had read before. Beautifully written with well rounded characters and a haunting tale. Definitely worth the read.

Oh wow - what an amazing little gem this book was! This was O'Flynn's debut novel. She's got a fan here that will be looking for her second.

The novel opens in 1984 and we meet nine year old Kate Meaney. She is a bit of a loner, preferring adults to children her own age. One of her favourite adults is Adrian, the son of a local shopkeeper. Kate is determined to be a detective. This is the driving force of her days. She carries a notebook and makes observations of all the people and situations she comes across. She has staked out both her neighbourhood and the new mall, Green Oaks. She decides to concentrate her time on Green Oaks. She shares her sleuthing dutiher little stuffed monkey. Until....she disappears.

O`Flynn's portrayal of this little girl is amazing. Her determination, earnestness, and curious mind are all vividly painted with words. I was somewhat reminded of Christopher - the main character in the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. (Another really good read!)

Fast forward to 2003 at the Green Oaks Mall. It has expanded and is very large now. Kurt works as a security guard on the night shift. One night he inexplicably see a young girl with a stuffed monkey on the security camera. When he searches, she is gone. Lisa, Adrian's sister works at a music store in the mall. Working late one night, she gets lost in the staff only corridors and finds a stuffed monkey lodged down by a pipe.

Lisa and Kurt are both lonely and feel their lives are empty. They meet and their lives become connected by a long missing little girl. The development of the characters of Lisa and Kurt is excellent. As with Kate, you immediately feel a real sense of their lives.

Having worked in retail hell for many years, I found O'Flynn's descriptions of the mall, it's workers and customers to be spot on, very funny at times, but also very sad.

This book is as much about the mystery of what happened to Kate as it is about Karl and Lisa reclaiming their lives.

O'Flynn was listed for many prizes for this debut novel - and rightly so!

Rarely do I find a book I can't put down...but this was one of them. Although I didn't want to savor every page, I wanted to know what was next without hesitation. The first part of the book is heartbreakingly sweet and funny. After that it is heartbreaking in its sadness and struggles. There are odd little breaks where random people's thoughts on randoms subjects are explored. I wanted them to make sense in the long run - but they didn't. They make this book less then great - but I definately recommend this book to anyone in love with a well written, imaginative, and memorable story.

There's something about precocious, bookish, lonely girls (I should know; I was one) that makes them excellent narrators: a rather literary vocabulary, a knack for not being noticed, a compulsion to write things down.

Such qualities come in handy when 10-year-old Kate Meaney embarks on a career as a private detective and establishes Falcon Investigations (the only other employee is a stuffed monkey named Mickey). As WHAT WAS LOST begins, it's 1984, and we find Kate staking out Green Oaks, her local shopping center, in search of crimes and misdemeanors. It soon becomes clear that her pretend games are combined with real powers of observation. Kate's descriptions of neighborhood merchants are funny and poignant (a butcher nobody patronizes much anymore, possibly because he "stood in his shop window, swatting flies against the sides of meat with a large palette knife"), and she nails elementary school herd behavior. When a new girl, Teresa, transcends all previous definitions of naughtiness, the class is shocked and disoriented, "like a small tribal culture whose cosmology is suddenly torn apart by the arrival of a box of cornflakes...." Kate also notices that Teresa has bruises and burns on her arms and legs, and is much smarter than she lets on.

This mix of Harriet the Spy-ish sardonic humor and dangerous reality runs through the entire novel; it soon develops that "what was lost," in Kate's case, was her father (her mother had already left), who drops dead one day, leaving her to the unsentimental care of her maternal grandmother, Ivy. Using a book called HOW TO BE A DETECTIVE, a gift from her father, Kate sets herself up as a professional watcher, keeping unbearable grief at bay with strict timetables (she allows herself only 10 minutes a day to play with her swivel chair) and systematic record-keeping (her father was a retired statistician). She also has a friend, Adrian, a kind, unambitious man in his 20s whose father runs the local newsagent/candy store and who treats Kate like an adult. She's surviving pretty well, considering, when Ivy decides she's too old to care for a child and resolves --- threatens is a better word --- to send Kate to Redspoon, a local boarding school with scholarships for bright kids.

Fast forward 19 years. We're no longer in Kate's head, but we're in one of her favorite hangouts, the Green Oaks mall. While watching his screens on the night shift, a young security guard, Kurt, twice glimpses a little girl clutching a toy monkey (no one else sees her). Meanwhile, Lisa, Adrian's younger sister, who also works at the mall --- as a beleaguered manager in a music superstore --- finds a toy monkey stuck behind some pipes. It turns out that Kate Meaney disappeared two decades ago, apparently vanishing into thin air after a trip to Redspoon to take the entrance exam. Adrian, treated by the police as a prime suspect in the case, absconds shortly thereafter. Are these sightings supernatural? Is the monkey a clue?

Catherine O'Flynn keeps the reader wondering about Kate's fate, but this middle section of the book is less a mystery than a grim portrait of the community's decline, circa 2003 --- lookalike chains stores instead of familiar shops and shopkeepers; huge, anonymous malls instead of factories where useful things are actually made. Kurt and Lisa epitomize the parallel loss of meaningful work, the paralyzing boredom and rage of imaginative people in dead-end service jobs, and their ruminations are both bitterly accurate and darkly funny (think Clerks transplanted to the British Midlands): "Lisa sat in the window of Burger King consuming saturated fat and a large carton of sugar. ...There was something in the air of Green Oaks that made everyone crave the complex non-flavors of highly processed, industrially honed calorific content, and Lisa was too tired to fight it today. Some of her colleagues ... spent so much money on the stuff, she wondered if it wouldn't be easier for them to be paid with a weekly shot of modified starches and trans fats...."

My only quibble is that O'Flynn seems a little too interested in her setting. A native of Birmingham, she knows the territory well and wanted, I suspect, to make a Big Statement about the post-industrial landscape. So there are digressions, and lots of them: quasi-sociological descriptions of mall culture and modern anomie that frequently have no direct bearing on the story. Kurt and Lisa's voices are as captivating and smart, in their way, as Kate's, but they sometimes feel a bit as if they belong to a different book.

Still, they are marvelous characters. And it is heartening to watch them meet, make a tentative, touching connection and begin to reconsider Kate's case, probing their own almost forgotten memories. When the truth of what happened comes out (with the book returning to 1984 for two brief segments), it is a mix of innocence, altruism and tragic accident, and it has a sad but lovely symmetry. Often first-time novelists fail with their endings. O'Flynn doesn't. WHAT WAS LOST is a real find.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

What a debut from a first-time author. This highly original novel tells the story of child-detective Katy, whose last investigation has surprising ramifications for a group of people who work at/live near a local shopping center. Is this a mystery? romance? drama? ghost story? You'll have no idea where this one is going, and you'll love every minute of it.

Catherine O'Flynn does such a good job of delaying important information about characters and their situation that it is almost impossible to review her fine first novel, WHAT WAS LOST, without giving something away. Let me just say that it is set near Birmingham, England, and involves two time periods, 1984 and 2003. In the first, we meet a ten-year-old girl, Kate Meaney, and her older friend Adrian. Kate leads a fantasy life as a detective, mostly observing people at the huge Green Oaks Mall. Though a college graduate, 22-year-old Adrian works behind the counter in his father's newsagent's shop; he is inspired by Kate's energy, but also seems to have a special understanding of her loneliness.

The 2003 sections are set almost entirely in the Mall. The two chief characters there are Lisa, who is assistant manager of a CD and video store, and Kurt, one of the security guards. Their connection with the 1984 story emerges only gradually, in the midst of an account of their frustrating dead-end jobs, their sometimes-comic relationships with their co-workers, and their discovery of one another. It is particularly interesting to see behind the scenes at the Mall, and visit the miles of unpainted concrete block corridors behind the glittering facades. The place becomes a metaphor for life, with most of the characters in the book inhabiting its unglamorous underside. But the people themselves are not uninteresting; indeed, the bleaker their environment, the more we get drawn into their lives as people.

Catherine O'Flynn says that she herself played detective as a child, and worked in a mall music store as an adult, jotting down notes that became the material for much of this book. Perhaps too much; there are times in both periods when the narrative thread is almost lost in the proliferation of anecdote. But this is an engaging book, and when the author pulls the two plot strands together (albeit with the aid of a few coincidences and a tinge of the supernatural) towards the end, it also becomes quite a moving one.

This is the debut novel of a very talented writer. It is a working class mystery set in the industrial ruins of the English Midlands and in a shopping mall in Birmingham. The story is set in two time zones: 1984 and 19 years later.

I would bet that Ms.O'Flynn didn't choose 1984 for nothing. England is one of the countries with the highest surveillance levels in the world, closed circuit television is everywhere. One of the main characters of the later events is a security guard who spends hours every day looking at CCTV screens in the mall. He sees something on a screen at night, which leads to events from the past, the vanishing without trace of a precocious 10 year old girl, a loner and `amateur detective' (due to a gift from her father, a guide `how to be a private investigator'). He teams up with a young woman who works in a music shop in the mall, whose brother had disappeared a little later than the little girl, when he was 22.

This writer knows what she is writing about. Her descriptions of places and events are down to earth. Her working life scenes have a distinctly Dilbertian quality. She can be humorous without annoying me and she knows when to drop it. Her scenes from family life are full of cynical wisdom about the real world. (What is the point of life? Wasting time until you die.)

How did I pick this up? In my shelves, I have different waiting hills of books. One consists of books that my daughter thinks I must read. She is not always right, but in this case I agree with her.