Lost Properly?

I've just finished 'Little Boy Lost' by Marghanita Laski, one of Persephone Books' rediscovered 20th century classics.  How this gem of a novel remained buried until the early 2000s, I'll never know!

'Little Boy Lost'
by Marghanita Laski
(Persephone Books, 2001)

After the death of his Parisian wife in occupied France, English poet Hilary Wainwright is content to believe that his baby son perished with her.  But when an unexpected guest arrives with news that the child may still be alive, Hilary suddenly finds himself duty-bound to begin searching for his son.  Returning to France after the war, he reluctantly follows a trail through the corrupt and abused country, until he meets a little boy in a poor orphanage 50 miles from Paris.  Every day for a week, he gets to know the child, Jean, but remains torn between his selfish desire for intellectual solitude and his need to love and be loved.

'Little Boy Lost' is a beautifully crafted, well observed analysis of Hilary, a complicated man caught between his desire to secrete himself away in an intellectual ivory tower and properly grieve for his lost wife and son.  He's not particularly likeable, but he is a realistic, contradictory human being.  As a result, tension is created not just by the will-he-won't-he search for the lost little boy, but also by whether Hilary is actually likely to make a good enough father.

His potential son Jean absolutely broke my heart.  I know I'm a big softy, but I was so affected by this story that I cried my eyes out over this fictional child.  I think this was the result of the post-war setting; there are probably children like Jean left homeless and lost after every conflict and this tale deftly reminds the reader of   the innocent and often lifelong victims of war.

Overall, 'Little Boy Lost' is an absolute emotional rollercoaster which forces you to keep reading in the hope everything would turn out well, but never gives the slightest reassurance that it could.  Right until the final pages, I had no idea which way it would go and whether the rug would be pulled out from under me and my hopes dashed.  Having built up the tension over 219 pages, in the end the writer breaks it perfectly in just one line.

It may not be a cheery ride, but I would thoroughly recommend this book.  It's extremely well written, features interesting and complex characters and is a real lesson in suspense. I can't wait to read more by the author and find out what other treasures have been unearthed by the clever people at Persephone Books!