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A review by girlwithherheadinabook
Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
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.