“You mean… They killed her?” asked David.
“They ate her,” said Brother Number One. “With porridge. That’s what ‘ran away and was never seen again’ means in these parts. It means ‘eaten.’ ”
“Um, and what about ‘happily ever after’?” asked David, a little uncertainly. “What does that mean?”
“Eaten quickly,” said Brother Number One.
And with that they reached the dwarf’s house.
“There are many kingdoms that might exist, and many kings,” said the wolf-man.
“You will not rule here,” said the Woodsman. “If you try, I will kill you and all of your brothers and sisters.”
The wolf-man opened its jaws and snarled. David trembled, but the Woodsman didn’t move an inch.
“It seems you have already begun. Was that your handiwork back in the forest?” asked the wolf-man, almost carelessly.
“These are my woods. My handiwork is all over them.”
“I am referring to the body of poor Ferdinand, my scout. He appears to have lost his head.”
“Was that his name? I never had the chance to ask. He was too intent on tearing out my throat for us to engage in idle chitchat.”
The wolf-man licked his lips. “He was hungry,” he said. “We are all hungry.”
– John Connolly. The Book of Lost Things.
Connolly is an accomplished thriller writer, which makes perfect sense, in a way. One of the central themes in this book has to do with crimes against children: stolen children, corrupted children, eaten children. Why is the dark presence in the book so attracted to children? Because “adults despair,” but children do not, and their dazzling energy, even when it has been improperly channeled and ensnared, keeps the monster fed for generations.
This offering by Connolly has drawn comparisons to C.S. Lewis – but it is much more sexually frank and deliciously weird. It is not a tale for children, though it centers around them. Having said that, I can’t imagine the hoity-toity set liking it very much. A recent Salon article by Tom Lutz says that there is a “horrible split between the writers and the critics that has riven every college and university in the country,” and it is my further belief that we are producing readers who are not encouraged to love stories as much as unravel them (Lutz may disagree – and he has good reason to; the article is definitely worth your while). The Book of Lost Things is perfectly suited for the slaughter – just imagine what we could make of the boy kissing a frozen fairy princess who looks like his dead mother! Ooh! Aah! Is that a magic dagger in your pocket, lad, or are you just happy to see me?
Connolly is aware of this as well – a psycopathic huntress who is intent on chopping up humans and making them “beautiful,” and even welding them with animals for her hunting needs, serves as a grisly characterization of an over-eager deconstructionist. Not that there is anything wrong with deconstruction per se, it’s just that instead of helping us be even more clever and creative, it can easily turn into a kind of flesh-eating virus when let out of the lab and left unsupervised and unchecked.
Like Lutz, I don’t believe in doomsday scenarios that claim that “evil academics are going to take the hammer, and the sickle, and smash the hell out of literature until there’s nothing left” – especially since literature, fairy tales especially, is having such a festive season as of late. But as a Duke undergraduate who majored in English, I was stunned to see how little my fellow classmates read for pleasure. And it wasn’t that they were all so busy snorting coke off each other’s underpants (lest I get another tedious lecture on the horrors of campus culture; go tear into someone else’s throat for a change, Mr. Wolf) – they viewed pleasure-reading as silly and unstimulating. If it wasn’t assigned by an authority figure, if you didn’t have to write a paper on it, it was probably worthless. This may have to do with how pampered and over-protected and controlled my generation is, of course, but the prevailing collegiate culture of “spot the Christ reference and how it un-sexes the female protagonist” certainly pitches in. And the politicization of studies in literature does not help – I don’t mind bringing in politics in the least, they certainly make a book discussion lively, but they provide one way of reading a text. It’s like playing “spot the Bush references and how it makes the movie unacceptable to us righteous lefties” during a screening of “300.” And us budding writers and critics with our youthful maximalism – we tend to forget these things. And we will rule the world one day…
In such a setting, Connolly’s stories, which are living things, really, let down their golden hair and allow us paunchy adults to scale back to that place in which we were once children. They don’t infantilize us or pat us on the head (they’re more likely to whack us with giant axes, actually), but they do remind us of the regenerative and redemptive qualities of hard work and the creative act. It’s such a simple thing to be reminded of – but it’s needed. I probably need it more than an academic with 20 years of experience, I can say that much, personally.
The Book of Lost Things is a wonderful space to get, uh, lost in. 😉
Natalia A. 