Both of the previous novels from this author, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and Confessions of An Ugly Stepsister, got glowing reviews here in Green Man, it won’t surprise you, me dear reader, that Lost is equally worth reading! Having tackled the Oz mythos and turned it inside out, and then moving to the centuries-old Cinderella story, Maguire decided to create a present-day tale of horror and madness that Stephen King would be proud to have written — if he could write this well. Yes, Lost is at least as good as vintage King novels were, and perhaps a bit better….
Gregory Maguire is the author of three novels for adults and a dozen novels for children. His children’s novels include The Hamlet Chronicles, a projected seven-book series including, to date, Seven Spiders Spinning, Six Haunted Hairdos, Five Alien Elves, and Four Stupid Cupids. In addition, he is a noted reviewer, having written reviews of books by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman. He has also contributed articles and essays to journals such as the Boston Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the Horn Book Magazine, and other periodicals. Mr. Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Tufts University (1990). He has taught at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature for eight years, and in 1986 was a founding member of Children’s Literature New England. He has lived abroad in Dublin and London, and now makes his home in Concord, Massachusetts with his partner, a noted visual artist, and their adopted child.
Gregory says: ‘Lost is not a retelling, but it does have a literary relationship to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It posits that there was a gentleman in North London in the early nineteenth century who was haunted by an unknown spectre. This gentleman told of his trials and travails to the young and impressionable Charles Dickens who, at age 12, spent six months or so in the same village in North London. The gentleman has a descendent four generations on named Winifred Rudge. Lost is the story of what happens to Winnie when she goes to spend time in the house in North London that had once belonged to her great-grandfather.’
Oh, but what a telling it is! This book has more in common with Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere than it does with either Wicked or Confessions. Winifred Rudge has both a name and a character in keeping with that of Richard, who’s the central character in Neverwhere. She’s a person not quite at ease with her life who’s making a living as a writer, but whose personal life is anything but going well. More out of boredom than anything else, Winifred decides to research the story of Jack the Ripper in order to write a novel about a young woman haunted by the ghost of this horrid being. (Old Jack has a fascination for fiction writers that’s hard for me to explain. Even the Babylon 5 teleseries made use of him as an actual character in a memorable episode!)
The ancestral house in London that she stays in may be inhabited by either the ghost of the Ripper or the ghost of the person, her great to the nth degree ancestor, who the family claims inspired Charles Dickens to create the character of Ebenezer Scrooge.
When Winnie first arrives at Rudge House, her ancestral home in Weatherall Walk in North London, she is ready to laugh about all her misfortunes in Boston with her step-cousin, John Comestor. But the house is empty and her cousin is nowhere to be found — ‘There was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit … the better furniture was hung over with drop cloths…’ — as if he’d never been there. Where has he gone? Why has the house been seemingly empty for some time? And why does it feel as if there’s someone there even though there’s no one to be seen? Just savor this passage, about a time when Winifred is anything but alone in the house: ‘They didn’t answer, which froze her in her pose for an extra few seconds, and then she was interrupted in her campaign to flee by the sound of knocking. It originated behind the pantry wall, much like the rap of human knuckles on wood. Three, four, five times.’ Brrrrr!
Are there spirits at work here? Or is Winifred cracking up like an egg exposed to boiling water set too high? Is there really a Ripper loose on the world? And was her ancestor really that mean and nasty? Or was Dickens full of shite? Will her missing cousin be found? And most importantly, will this woman actually be able to understand herself? (That trait is in keeping with the motif of the Gaiman novel I mentioned earlier.)
Several reviewers have complained that the plotline is cobbled together out of many disparate and intriguing strands, and then the climax is well, anti-climatic. I sort of agree, but the same can be said for Gaiman’s American Gods and Neverwhere, and Lost works as well as they did. Yes, the plot wanders; yes, some of the secondary characters make no sense; and yes, it could have been, oh, fifty pages shorter, but it is, in the end, a fun read. And Maguire is a good writer — much better at describing things than Stephen King is.
Go read it — you won’t be disappointed!
(HarperCollins, 2001)
