The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2023)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
“Twice upon a time,” as The Land of Lost Things starts, I fell in love with a book. It has all the elements I enjoy: old libraries in abandoned houses opening entries to parallel worlds, ancient woods populated by stranger, darker creatures, primeval gods from the dawn of history, fairy lords rivalling humans, and a deeply moving and emotional story—but there is something more to the book, a quality both rare and precious: its over-arching humanity that stretches through universal (and thus relatable) mythological tropes.
On the very basic level, John Connolly’s story is as simple as it is old. It explores the deep connection a mother shares with her daughter, and the grief and agony she feels when her daughter is hit by a car and reduced to a vegetable state. In the beginning of the book, Ceres is slipping into despair as it seems that there is no hope and her daughter will be refused treatment any day. This overwhelming, overpowering, shattering anguish makes her consider death as a better option, and this momentary weakness sets her on an epic journey through the liminal underworld to win another chance for her child to live.
Literary references spread like ripples on the water. Connolly’s Ceres, a despondent London single mother, shares certain similarities with the chthonic proto-goddess of life and death as Ceres the goddess is the Roman equivalent of Demeter, the patron of agriculture whose daughter Persephone was kidnapped by the king of the underworld. In response to this injustice Demeter neglected her duties and plunged the world in a deadly famine, which was only resolved after Persephone was restored to her mother (at least to some extent). Ceres the goddess also maintained the boundaries between the realms of the living and the dead and guarded the portals into the world of the dead, something that Ceres the protagonist will have to challenge as she fights for her daughter’s life.
Embroidered with multicoloured threads of classical mythology, familiar fairy-tales and English folklore, The Land of Lost Things has harpies and dryads, witches and bridge trolls, the cruel Fay sleeping in the burial mounds (similar to the Irish aos si/sidhe, not to be mixed up with benevolent Victorian fairies), Rapunzel and Red Riding Hood, the Green Man and even Gogmagog, the legendary giant that lived in Albion. The liminal world Ceres finds herself in is preternaturally flexible and unfixed it time, and it reforms itself to exploit her fantasies and her fears, not dissimilar to Robert Holdstock’s mythagos that spawn from memories and myths within a human mind. Ceres’ version of the place carries distinct smells of precocious childhood in a book-loving family: her father loved folklore and told her spine-chilling bloodthirsty fairy tales with perfunctory rapes and matter-of-fact dismemberments. Yet every enemy she faces, every battle she enters makes her stronger and wiser, or rather, brings out her strength, her will, her determination that she has lost.
Transported into the world of her dreams, Ceres is a teenager again, neither a grownup, nor a child, experience trapped in the body of innocence, and as her childhood memories shape the landscape around her, she reminiscences about things from her past. Her companion, the nameless Woodsman, is a strong paternal figure who reminds her of her father (and annoys her in the same way her father used to annoy her teenage self), and in the climactic moment lets her go to challenge her fate. In this sense, the “lost things” in the title have many faces. It is the mother’s grief over her daughter’s illness, but it is also the child in her grieving over the loss of her father, and missing the simplicity of being young and courageous and having the will to fight for what you believe is right.
Ceres’ journey towards the transcendent beyond, an exploration of the limbo, a threshold between life and death; is a retelling of a personal encounter with the mystery. But it is also a story about stories, about reading and writing, about telling stories and being told. It is a book that brings Ceres to the abandoned mansion which becomes her portal to the liminal space (a nod to The Book of Lost Things (2006), Connolly’s first book in this universe, about a boy grieving for his mother). It is a book, written by Ceres, that brings her daughter back to life. In the palimpsest of narratives, reminiscences and retellings (some of them with quite an unexpected twist), Connolly insists, our lives are stories in the process of being written, and we are in charge—we always have the choice of where our story leads us.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.