BROOKE DAVIS Lost & Found. Reviewed by Virat Nehru
Three characters set out to find what they have lost in this novel about the rituals of grieving.
Striking an uncanny balance between probing and restraint, Australian author Brooke Davis’s debut novel Lost & Found examines the rituals of grieving – how to make sense of life when the moments shared with someone you dearly loved become just that: moments.
It’s a disarmingly intimate novel that critiques the severe lack of social empathy surrounding death. There appear to be ‘acceptable’ time frames for grieving, depending on whether the death was of a loved one, a stranger, or even a pet. After that, we are supposed to simply move on.
That’s exactly what the three main characters – seven-and-a-half-year-old Millie, 87-year-old Karl and 82-year-old Agatha – are unable to do. Abandoned by her mother, Millie keeps thinking about the moments she spent with her parents, including her now deceased father. Karl – a character first introduced in Davis’s short story ‘Karl the Touch Typist’ – has lost his fingers and his sense of being, pining over his late beloved Evie. Agatha has not stepped out of her house for seven years, since the death of her husband Ron.
The narrative switches back and forth in a fragmented manner, giving snippets of perspective from Millie, Karl and Agatha. The fragmented style is effective, undercutting the emotionally charged subject matter. Throughout the novel, Davis keeps referring to things or facts about the world that the characters are ‘sure’ about, acting as an external paradigm and enhancing the sense of uncertainty that the characters actually feel.
The voice of young Millie is the most intriguing. Davis has got the Gaiman-esque quality of evoking a child’s inability to comprehend the conventions of the adult world. Millie is unsure why there is so much secrecy surrounding death and to quench her curiosity, she keeps a ‘Book of Dead Things’. She becomes the medium through which Davis questions the way society is preoccupied with trying to protect the most vulnerable, and in the process, sometimes goes overboard. Young Millie is perceptive and inquisitive in equal measure, but she is still a child. This peculiar mix of ‘childlike maturity’ makes for some vivid memories of her parents:
When playing Dot-to-Dot, Millie was always Dot One, her mum Dot Two and her dad Dot Three. The line came from deep inside Dot One’s belly, wrapped itself around Dot Two and Three – usually watching the tellie – and back again, to make a triangle. Millie would run around the house, her red hair bouncing about her head, the triangle between them spiralling around the furniture. When her mum said, ‘Would you stop that, Millicent?’ the triangle roared into an enormous dinosaur. When her dad said, ‘Come sit beside me, Squirt’, the triangle curled into a big, beating heart.
At times, Millie’s acuity is a bit too profound, as if it’s an adult’s conception of what a child should sound like. Despite that, the sections where Millie reminisces about time spent with her parents are incredibly moving and definitely among the highlights of the novel. The prose here is short, sharp and terse, maintaining an internal rhythm that complements the restrained tone.
Stylistically, the book has a distinctive layout that takes a while to settle into. All speech is in italics, which makes it slightly difficult in some instances to differentiate spoken dialogue from internalised thought. Things, ideas or concepts that young Millie does not understand are capitalised. The formatting choices aren’t a hindrance to the reader, but neither do they add anything that would otherwise be missing to the text on the page.
The narrative loses shape in the middle and the prose stutters slightly when the characters come together for their ‘road trip’ in search of Millie’s mother. The transition from the focused restraint of the beginning to the emotional hopscotch of the middle isn’t smooth; some of the build-up of sustained tension that had gathered momentum is lost and the prose starts showing signs of lethargy. However, the characteristic restraint comes back soon after to deliver a satisfying and suitably understated climax.
The novel contains an implicit social commentary and Davis is able slide from the micro to the macro and vice-versa with ease. For example, when Agatha mulls over the objectification that women have to put up with every day:
She remembered learning that all men had those monstrosities dangling between their legs. She couldn’t look at a man for a number of months afterwards. Just the knowledge that there were so many hidden penises around unnerved her. She didn’t know how other women could live in a world like this. She felt surrounded, trapped. Men walked past her in the street and said ‘hello’ with such smugness, and all Agatha could do was look at the ground and think, ‘He has a penis he has a penis he has a penis’.
Lost & Found is a manifesto against the absurd repression of pain – where sharing our pain somehow makes us appear vulnerable. When shared, an individual grief becomes a collective experience. The resultant increased empathy between the characters, and in turn between them and the rest of the world, breaks down any defensive walls in the reader as well.
Davis demonstrates the absurdity of a world caught up in rituals but lacking in compassion. Through the behaviours of Millie, Karl and Agatha, readers are made aware of their own little rituals that they might turn to for solace, in order to keep the uncomfortable at bay. This is a well-crafted debut novel but above all, it’s the examination of the uncomfortable and the unsaid that makes Lost & Found stand out.
Brooke Davis Lost & Found Hachette Australia 2014 PB 272pp $26.99
Virat Nehru is an undergraduate student at Sydney University and a freelance journalist. He tweets at @6thrat
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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