Simply Social

Simply Social chose ‘What was Lost’ by Catherine O’Flynn as their July book.

A tender and sharply observant debut novel about a missing young girl—winner of the Costa First Novel Award and long-listed for the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and The Guardian First Book Award

In the 1980s, Kate Meaney—“Top Secret” notebook and toy monkey in tow—is hard at work as a junior detective. Busy trailing “suspects” and carefully observing everything around her at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping mall, she forms an unlikely friendship with Adrian, the son of a local shopkeeper. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press.

Then, in 2003, Adrian’s sister Lisa—stuck in a dead-end relationship—is working as a manager at Your Music, a discount record store. Every day she tears her hair out at the outrageous behaviour of her customers and colleagues. But along with a security guard, Kurt, she becomes entranced by the little girl glimpsed on the mall’s surveillance cameras. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, Lisa and Kurt investigate how these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks itself. Written with warmth and wit, What Was Lost is a haunting debut from an incredible new talent.

The novel, set in Birmingham in the mid-eighties, traces the story of a young girl called Kate. Kate aspires to be a great detective, spending days on stake-out at her local shopping centre. The narrative then jumps 20 years, when the ghost of a little girl starts appearing in service corridors. The author’s offers an astute observation on consumerism, similarities of which I am sure are played out in shopping centre’s up and down the country and go to make this far more than a generic mystery and the icing on the cake is a twist in the tail which I really didn’t see coming.

A good read.

The People’s Act of Love
by James Meek

This powerful novel takes place in 1919 in Yasyk, a little town on the edge of the vast Siberian hinterland where some Czech soldiers are left marooned by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and a secretive, utopian community of voluntary eunuchs, called skoptsy, are living. We also learn about the practice of taking a naive companion along on Siberian journeys with the intention of eating him.

The story starts in two places. First, in a university town in 1910, where two students, boy and girl, embrace the revolution and one another. He is unable to prevent her from attempting to throw a bomb; she is caught, and exiled to Siberia.

The main story begins nine years later in Yasyk. The quartet at the centre of the story consists of an attractive woman, her ex-husband who has become a skoptsy, and her two lovers, a Czech soldier of Jewish extraction and the erstwhile boy student, a recent arrival who has just emerged from Siberia.

Characters tell their stories to one another; or their stories are told, in long, leisurely loops. By means of these interlocking, densely textured, convincing fables, Meek locates common ground between skoptsy, revolutionaries, and cannibals as responses to the appalling inequities of Tsarist Russia.

An essential key is given to the reader in the first pages, where the students recite words they know by heart: ‘The nature of the true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism, any sentimentality, rapture or enthusiasm … he is not a revolutionary if he feels pity for anything in this world.’ Thus, he - or she - is required to dehumanise. Similarly, though on quite different grounds, the skoptsy, in identifying lust as the root of all evil, attempt to divest themselves of humanity along with their genitals in order to become ‘like angels’. Anna is human and inconsistent; she changes her mind about lovers, worries about her son. But both her husband and the student Samarin, in their separate ways, select a single version of their personality and stick to it, at a cost which the novel questions.

Another question which the narrative poses is about the relation between sexual feeling and human feeling. In a wholly logical denouement, the revolutionary Samarin ends up begging a skoptsy to castrate him in order that his service to the revolution should no longer be undermined by irrational affection.

Notes taken from a review in The Observer.

Although this was not an easy read it was worth the effort and on reaching the conclusion there is more clarity and understanding of both the story and Meek’s skill in allowing it to unfold in a seemingly fragmented way.