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barbarabarbara's review against another edition
emotional
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.25
siguirimama's review against another edition
4.0
4.5
Beautiful- and had me gripped until the very last word.
Beautiful- and had me gripped until the very last word.
callum_mclaughlin's review against another edition
5.0
This book is so full of heart. I found it instantly engrossing and utterly compelling throughout. A book that focusses on the instinctual draw of paternal love is something of a rarity (especially one from this era). But this story is such a gem and it’s so beautifully realised.
The emotional complexity of the main character is phenomenal. Laski brilliantly portrays the internal struggle that Hilary feels when he gets the tip-off that his long-lost son may still be alive. He feels equally duty bound to try and find the child in question as he does fearful that it may indeed be his son. After all, he has gone through the loss of his beloved wife and years of believing the son he never really knew was also gone. He has made himself become emotionally numb as a means of protecting himself from further heartache. The more he stands to gain from a potential bond with the child, the more he is opening himself up to the possibility of losing everything again:
"The traitor emotions of love and tenderness and pity must stay dead in me. I could not endure them to live and then die again."
The book is also fantastic in capturing a very specific moment in France's history. The post-war tension present in the country is palpable; not just between different nationalities, but between fellow Frenchmen. The aura of distrust and lingering resentment between those who were part of the Resistance and those who were collaborators during the Occupation simmers throughout, and serves as a fascinating backdrop for the story:
"Then she said reluctantly, 'As a Christian one should be charitable, monsieur, but as a Frenchwoman it is difficult to refrain from making judgements. We all can see that the position of an hotel-keeper is difficult under an Occupation, but there were some who brought out their worst wines for the Germans, and some who brought out their best. Monsieur Leblanc was one of the latter.'"
The central themes of loss and healing are cleverly reflected in several aspects of the story. There is, most blatantly, the little boy of the title whom Hilary seeks, but Hilary himself is also lost in many ways. In searching for his son, he is also searching for the sense of self that he has lost. Thus, the book is as much about him trying to find his capacity to accept the pain of his past, and to open himself up to the possibility of love again, as it is about him tracking down the child. The themes are also present in the setting itself, with France shown to be in a state of repair; trying in times of great hardship to reclaim its sense of culture and identity following decimation and liberation.
The pacing and build up towards a sense of climax are excellent, and the emotional payoff is both perfectly pitched and hugely satisfying. I haven't felt this emotionally invested in a story and a set of characters for quite some time. For that reason, I think this book will hold a very special place in my heart from now on.
The emotional complexity of the main character is phenomenal. Laski brilliantly portrays the internal struggle that Hilary feels when he gets the tip-off that his long-lost son may still be alive. He feels equally duty bound to try and find the child in question as he does fearful that it may indeed be his son. After all, he has gone through the loss of his beloved wife and years of believing the son he never really knew was also gone. He has made himself become emotionally numb as a means of protecting himself from further heartache. The more he stands to gain from a potential bond with the child, the more he is opening himself up to the possibility of losing everything again:
"The traitor emotions of love and tenderness and pity must stay dead in me. I could not endure them to live and then die again."
The book is also fantastic in capturing a very specific moment in France's history. The post-war tension present in the country is palpable; not just between different nationalities, but between fellow Frenchmen. The aura of distrust and lingering resentment between those who were part of the Resistance and those who were collaborators during the Occupation simmers throughout, and serves as a fascinating backdrop for the story:
"Then she said reluctantly, 'As a Christian one should be charitable, monsieur, but as a Frenchwoman it is difficult to refrain from making judgements. We all can see that the position of an hotel-keeper is difficult under an Occupation, but there were some who brought out their worst wines for the Germans, and some who brought out their best. Monsieur Leblanc was one of the latter.'"
The central themes of loss and healing are cleverly reflected in several aspects of the story. There is, most blatantly, the little boy of the title whom Hilary seeks, but Hilary himself is also lost in many ways. In searching for his son, he is also searching for the sense of self that he has lost. Thus, the book is as much about him trying to find his capacity to accept the pain of his past, and to open himself up to the possibility of love again, as it is about him tracking down the child. The themes are also present in the setting itself, with France shown to be in a state of repair; trying in times of great hardship to reclaim its sense of culture and identity following decimation and liberation.
The pacing and build up towards a sense of climax are excellent, and the emotional payoff is both perfectly pitched and hugely satisfying. I haven't felt this emotionally invested in a story and a set of characters for quite some time. For that reason, I think this book will hold a very special place in my heart from now on.
jayjaycee1's review against another edition
4.0
What a story! I had not read work authored in this period at all, nor written in this style, so it took a little getting used to. But i shall leave the style there. What i really want to say that rarely do i come across a story where i cant guess the outcome. Infact i cant remember the last time. Not until the last few lines do you learn what happens. And this was done so skillfully that i was nearly unmade by the suspense. Once finished i had to go back a few pages to sheerly enjoy it again. And, this a book my neighbour found on a hard rubbish heap.
bookgirl01's review against another edition
2.0
Poignant, deeply felt. But all in all, not my cup of tea.
balancinghistorybooks's review against another edition
5.0
With the exception of one book on the Persephone list (Heat Lightning by Helen Hull), I have very much enjoyed those which I have read so far. I purchased Little Boy Lost just a week or two before I started reading it, and began it whilst on a trip to London. I was so engrossed that I probably would have missed my stop, had King’s Cross not been the end of the line.
I cannot do the fabulous blurb of this book justice, so I have copied it below:
Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary’s struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.
“Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy’s long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It’s a foreign child, he thought numbly . . .”
Little Boy Lost has many layers within it – grief, love, loss, the French Resistance movements, friendships, displacement – and everything has been so well balanced. I do not wish to give too much away in my review, but the arc of the story is perfect, the characters – particularly the children – marvellously drawn, and the psychology believable. It has been beautifully written, and Laski’s is a style which is incredibly easy to immerse oneself into. I was on tenterhooks throughout, and this much adored novel ranks among my favourite Persephones so far.
Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary’s struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.
“Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy’s long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It’s a foreign child, he thought numbly . . .”
I cannot do the fabulous blurb of this book justice, so I have copied it below:
Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary’s struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.
“Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy’s long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It’s a foreign child, he thought numbly . . .”
Little Boy Lost has many layers within it – grief, love, loss, the French Resistance movements, friendships, displacement – and everything has been so well balanced. I do not wish to give too much away in my review, but the arc of the story is perfect, the characters – particularly the children – marvellously drawn, and the psychology believable. It has been beautifully written, and Laski’s is a style which is incredibly easy to immerse oneself into. I was on tenterhooks throughout, and this much adored novel ranks among my favourite Persephones so far.
Hilary Wainwright, an English soldier, returns to a blasted and impoverished France during World War Two in order to trace a child lost five years before. But is this small, quiet boy in a grim orphanage really his son? And what if he is not? In this exquisitely crafted novel, we follow Hilary’s struggle to love in the midst of a devastating war.
“Facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy’s long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surely several sizes too large. It’s a foreign child, he thought numbly . . .”
girlwithherheadinabook's review against another edition
5.0
Review published here: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2016/07/review-little-boy-lost-marghanita-laski.html
Little Boy Lost was a book that made me smile, get very teary-eyed and have to blink a lot and then finally, shout at the book until my boyfriend told me to pipe down. It runs a full emotional gamut yet despite a premise that could seem predictable – a parent searching for his missing child – this is a novel which is anything but. Set in France very shortly after the end of the war, this is as much a cynical look at post-war Europe as it is a story of individual people. While the little boy of the title could be taken to mean Hilary Wainright’s missing son, Hilary himself is pathetic and lost too, as are so many of the people he meets. This is no sentimental story with guaranteed happy ending – I was alarmed to realise that it was filmed in 1953 with Bing Crosby in the lead – there are no heroes here, only lost children and we have no idea if they will have the courage to find each other.
Hilary Wainright is a cliche of an upper class English intellectual – he is a poet, writer, he served bravely in the war. We meet him at Christmas in his mother’s house, in the middle of the war. Amongst the chaos of his nephews’ enjoyment of the festivities, he is thinking of his own child far away in France. Later that evening, he receives a visitor, Pierre, who confirms that Hilary’s wife is indeed dead but that her plan to get their son to a place of safety has failed. The infant boy is lost, gone who knows where – it will be impossible to divine his fate until after the conflict is over. It is several years later, upon the arrival of peace, that Pierre, who has made it his mission to recover the child, summons Hilary to France, believing that he may have tracked down that lost little boy.
There are several ways to take this novel – on the one hand it is a simple seek and discovery plot, but yet not so because Hilary is not so sure that he really wants to find his child. He managed to smuggle himself back into France at around the time of the boy’s birth but little John only ever existed in theory, as an expression of Hilary’s love for his wife, a love that Hilary remembers most fondly via poetry rather than through a tangible person. Parental yearning is absent – Hilary does not understand children, does not care for them, he has no longing for this baby of his who has grown up unattended, he has told his mother and relatives that the child is definitively dead and indeed there is no certainty that this is not so. So, there is another level to the story, as we watch Hilary, the emotionally shut down survivor – he served in the army, helped hide British soldiers, as did his wife but is he now ill-fitted for a peacetime domestic life?
Hilary is a very difficult character to warm to – he is the worst kind of intellectual; selfish, unbending, both high and narrow-minded, irritable, easily-offended – and he does little over the course of the novel to endear himself to the reader. His ideals have no basis in practicality and one wonders what sort of a husband he might have made his adored Lisa had the war not intervened. Pierre is the one who is manning the search with Hilary even refusing to provide a photo of himself aged five since that would have involved admitting to his mother that there was a chance the boy was still alive. Upon finally arriving in France, Hilary wonders to Pierre what part these people walking past in the street played during the occupation – Pierre replies that he has found it easier not to dwell on this. Pierre handles the highly-strung Hilary with care, surrounding him with like-minded people, but still this is not enough – Hilary takes against him once and for all when he discovers that the man is a Gaullist.
The descriptions of post-war France are truly grim – this is a land that has lost all claims to morality. Published in 1949, Little Boy Lost comes long before the myth of the Resistance began, it is a portrait of a country picking itself up with a bad hangover, shame-faced and unable to meet the eye of those who know exactly what it did when it thought nobody was watching. Hilary comes to the no-horse town of A_, fifty miles from Paris and location of the orphanage where his child may be living. It is an awful place, the only available hotel is run by the appalling Leblancs – as one local explains, when the Nazis were in town, ‘there were some who brought out the worst wine and some who brought out the best,’ the Leblancs call into the latter category. Hilary has a disgust of all of these people and of the poverty across France, yet finds himself all too willing to pay black market prices if it means that he too gets the better wine.
The book is lifted when Hilary visits the orphanage and is introduced by the nuns to little Jean, who is a truly endearing child. Still , it is here that the tension truly begins to rise due to Hilary’sincreasing determination to reach absolute certainty about whether the boy is his before he will claim him. We see the pathetic state of the orphanage, how little Jean has no personal belongings, despite magpieing away broken toys and pebbles. We hear from the orphanage Mother that like all his fellows, Jean is mal-nourished since unlike Hilary, the orphanage cannot afford to pay for the black market. Once he reaches six, Jean will not be able to claim free milk and so will become anaemic and will most likely contract rickets. There is also the likelihood of him catching tuberculosis since some of the children are carriers.
Laski does a fantastic job at conveying the rhythms of French speech in her writing – although it is all written in English, I could imagine little Jean’s piping French as he walked along beside Hilary, and indeed the words of the other adults around him. Hilary, whose French was fluent but non-native seems different. There is a break at one point when Hilary visits the home of an elderly lady who spent her childhood summers in England and there the speeches change. Laski’s prose is phenomenal but it is this true ear for dialogue which takes her novel to a whole other level.
The exchanges between Jean and Hilary could so easily have been hackneyed, with Hilary rediscovering emotion too quickly or in too saccharine a fashion. Instead, Hilary is uncertain, unused to children. He buys little Jean gloves which then fail to fit, leaving the child heartbroken and also passionately attached to these, his first ever present. Hilary takes the child to the funfair but does not know how to handle an over-excited young boy. Hilary has been restricting himself for years to meaningless sexual encounters, relationships devoid of depth and is now unsure how to approach someone who has needs and is desperate for affection. There is never any guarantee that Hilary will decide to take little Jean away with him – we have seen him make bad decisions throughout the novel, turning away Pierre on a minor point of principle, paying the Leblancs extra to access the black market and Hilary is not at all sure that he wants to take on a child, even if there is a chance that it is his own child.
The elderly lady with the English manners has a very prescient observation on the legacy that war has left them, “To me, the most horrible thing is hearing everyone excusing themselves on the ground that deceit was started against the Germans and has now become a habit. It would have been better to have been honest, even with Germans, than to end by deceiving each other and finally by deceiving ourselves.” Hilary puts his selfishness down to his grief and bereavement, that his beautiful love with Lisa has been spoiled, that they may not now ever live the ideal life on a farm in the countryside that he wrote about, the inspiration behind this poetry which so many of his fellow intellectuals celebrate him for. Yet has this perhaps not become a habit, has he not deliberately lost himself since it was easier to remain a boy rather than take on the mantle of a man?
Little Boy Lost is a haunting novel, not just because of the final pages which were emotionally testing to put it mildly, but also because of the wider point which Laski makes about the state of Europe after the war. Little Jean was only one lost little boy – aged five, it was so very easy to make him happy, but there is the heavy suspicion that nobody will have the time to try. There were a great many like him, just as there were a great many who met their ends along with Hilary’s wife Lisa. These dark fates peek out from the sidelines of the novel, a story written with the harshness of a lived experience. Laski manages to make her portrait of the post-war world beautiful but it is painful nonetheless. I have never reached the final line of a novel with more relief – a truly stunning book.
Little Boy Lost was a book that made me smile, get very teary-eyed and have to blink a lot and then finally, shout at the book until my boyfriend told me to pipe down. It runs a full emotional gamut yet despite a premise that could seem predictable – a parent searching for his missing child – this is a novel which is anything but. Set in France very shortly after the end of the war, this is as much a cynical look at post-war Europe as it is a story of individual people. While the little boy of the title could be taken to mean Hilary Wainright’s missing son, Hilary himself is pathetic and lost too, as are so many of the people he meets. This is no sentimental story with guaranteed happy ending – I was alarmed to realise that it was filmed in 1953 with Bing Crosby in the lead – there are no heroes here, only lost children and we have no idea if they will have the courage to find each other.
Hilary Wainright is a cliche of an upper class English intellectual – he is a poet, writer, he served bravely in the war. We meet him at Christmas in his mother’s house, in the middle of the war. Amongst the chaos of his nephews’ enjoyment of the festivities, he is thinking of his own child far away in France. Later that evening, he receives a visitor, Pierre, who confirms that Hilary’s wife is indeed dead but that her plan to get their son to a place of safety has failed. The infant boy is lost, gone who knows where – it will be impossible to divine his fate until after the conflict is over. It is several years later, upon the arrival of peace, that Pierre, who has made it his mission to recover the child, summons Hilary to France, believing that he may have tracked down that lost little boy.
There are several ways to take this novel – on the one hand it is a simple seek and discovery plot, but yet not so because Hilary is not so sure that he really wants to find his child. He managed to smuggle himself back into France at around the time of the boy’s birth but little John only ever existed in theory, as an expression of Hilary’s love for his wife, a love that Hilary remembers most fondly via poetry rather than through a tangible person. Parental yearning is absent – Hilary does not understand children, does not care for them, he has no longing for this baby of his who has grown up unattended, he has told his mother and relatives that the child is definitively dead and indeed there is no certainty that this is not so. So, there is another level to the story, as we watch Hilary, the emotionally shut down survivor – he served in the army, helped hide British soldiers, as did his wife but is he now ill-fitted for a peacetime domestic life?
Hilary is a very difficult character to warm to – he is the worst kind of intellectual; selfish, unbending, both high and narrow-minded, irritable, easily-offended – and he does little over the course of the novel to endear himself to the reader. His ideals have no basis in practicality and one wonders what sort of a husband he might have made his adored Lisa had the war not intervened. Pierre is the one who is manning the search with Hilary even refusing to provide a photo of himself aged five since that would have involved admitting to his mother that there was a chance the boy was still alive. Upon finally arriving in France, Hilary wonders to Pierre what part these people walking past in the street played during the occupation – Pierre replies that he has found it easier not to dwell on this. Pierre handles the highly-strung Hilary with care, surrounding him with like-minded people, but still this is not enough – Hilary takes against him once and for all when he discovers that the man is a Gaullist.
The descriptions of post-war France are truly grim – this is a land that has lost all claims to morality. Published in 1949, Little Boy Lost comes long before the myth of the Resistance began, it is a portrait of a country picking itself up with a bad hangover, shame-faced and unable to meet the eye of those who know exactly what it did when it thought nobody was watching. Hilary comes to the no-horse town of A_, fifty miles from Paris and location of the orphanage where his child may be living. It is an awful place, the only available hotel is run by the appalling Leblancs – as one local explains, when the Nazis were in town, ‘there were some who brought out the worst wine and some who brought out the best,’ the Leblancs call into the latter category. Hilary has a disgust of all of these people and of the poverty across France, yet finds himself all too willing to pay black market prices if it means that he too gets the better wine.
The book is lifted when Hilary visits the orphanage and is introduced by the nuns to little Jean, who is a truly endearing child. Still , it is here that the tension truly begins to rise due to Hilary’sincreasing determination to reach absolute certainty about whether the boy is his before he will claim him. We see the pathetic state of the orphanage, how little Jean has no personal belongings, despite magpieing away broken toys and pebbles. We hear from the orphanage Mother that like all his fellows, Jean is mal-nourished since unlike Hilary, the orphanage cannot afford to pay for the black market. Once he reaches six, Jean will not be able to claim free milk and so will become anaemic and will most likely contract rickets. There is also the likelihood of him catching tuberculosis since some of the children are carriers.
Laski does a fantastic job at conveying the rhythms of French speech in her writing – although it is all written in English, I could imagine little Jean’s piping French as he walked along beside Hilary, and indeed the words of the other adults around him. Hilary, whose French was fluent but non-native seems different. There is a break at one point when Hilary visits the home of an elderly lady who spent her childhood summers in England and there the speeches change. Laski’s prose is phenomenal but it is this true ear for dialogue which takes her novel to a whole other level.
The exchanges between Jean and Hilary could so easily have been hackneyed, with Hilary rediscovering emotion too quickly or in too saccharine a fashion. Instead, Hilary is uncertain, unused to children. He buys little Jean gloves which then fail to fit, leaving the child heartbroken and also passionately attached to these, his first ever present. Hilary takes the child to the funfair but does not know how to handle an over-excited young boy. Hilary has been restricting himself for years to meaningless sexual encounters, relationships devoid of depth and is now unsure how to approach someone who has needs and is desperate for affection. There is never any guarantee that Hilary will decide to take little Jean away with him – we have seen him make bad decisions throughout the novel, turning away Pierre on a minor point of principle, paying the Leblancs extra to access the black market and Hilary is not at all sure that he wants to take on a child, even if there is a chance that it is his own child.
The elderly lady with the English manners has a very prescient observation on the legacy that war has left them, “To me, the most horrible thing is hearing everyone excusing themselves on the ground that deceit was started against the Germans and has now become a habit. It would have been better to have been honest, even with Germans, than to end by deceiving each other and finally by deceiving ourselves.” Hilary puts his selfishness down to his grief and bereavement, that his beautiful love with Lisa has been spoiled, that they may not now ever live the ideal life on a farm in the countryside that he wrote about, the inspiration behind this poetry which so many of his fellow intellectuals celebrate him for. Yet has this perhaps not become a habit, has he not deliberately lost himself since it was easier to remain a boy rather than take on the mantle of a man?
Little Boy Lost is a haunting novel, not just because of the final pages which were emotionally testing to put it mildly, but also because of the wider point which Laski makes about the state of Europe after the war. Little Jean was only one lost little boy – aged five, it was so very easy to make him happy, but there is the heavy suspicion that nobody will have the time to try. There were a great many like him, just as there were a great many who met their ends along with Hilary’s wife Lisa. These dark fates peek out from the sidelines of the novel, a story written with the harshness of a lived experience. Laski manages to make her portrait of the post-war world beautiful but it is painful nonetheless. I have never reached the final line of a novel with more relief – a truly stunning book.
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