Beth James
posted 16 May 2007

What Was Lost is clearly a first novel. It is a bit shaky in parts and the various narrative strands do not always fit together as neatly as they could. Once you add in some memorable characters, a bit of deus ex machina and an almost too neat ending, what you’re left with is a nearly satisfying piece of fiction.

The book unfolds in alternating sections set in 1984 and 2004. The 1984 sections feature Kate Meaney, a self-styled girl detective. In the best tradition of children’s literature (eg. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Harry Potter; Nancy Drew), Kate is a semi-orphan whose minimally supervised life gives her plenty of scope to be a detective. But make no mistake: this is not children’s literature. Kate’s essential naïveté is conveyed by the narrative directly, which is written from her point of view. However, the reader sees things that Kate cannot. Striking the balance between a faux innocence and the ‘truth’ sensed by the reader is a delicate business and one which shows O’Flynn’s writing ability to its greatest effect.

O’Flynn presents us with a mystery, but the cause of the disappearance of ten-year-old Kate is ultimately less important than how the event affects the other people in the novel. Unusually for a book that can be considered as part of the crime genre, What Was Lost features characters who are far more important, and indeed interesting, than the plot around them. If the reader wants to know what happens next, it’s because knowing takes you deeper into the world of the characters, not because you’re carried there by any conventional use of suspense.

In the 2004 sections we meet a cast of characters united by their connection to the shopping mall Kate had under surveillance twenty years earlier. The main characters in these sections work in the mall in various capacities. And generally unrelated to the main plot and these main characters, are passages told from the perspectives of various shoppers and others hanging about in the mall for legal, as well as illegal, purposes. These passages are some of the weaker aspects of the novel. While O’Flynn clearly intends many of them to be humorous, they miss the mark as often as they hit it and are often merely extended clichés about modern consumerist life.

Judging from the author’s biography on the fly cover, it is clear that O’Flynn shares at least some superficial characteristics with Lisa, an assistant manager in a Virgin Megastore by another name. How much of the story is autobiographical is unclear, but Lisa, stuck in a dead-end, socially negligible service sector job and equally dead-end relationship, constitutes one half of the book’s moral centre.

The other half of that moral centre is security guard Kurt. While Lisa’s function in the book’s social message is to show the soul-destroying nature of service sector work, Kurt’s family background provides us with a sugar-coated vision of ‘how things used to be’ for the working classes in the West Midlands. The degradation of work in and around a shopping mall is contrasted with the dignity of industrial labour. However, the contrast is presented in such a way that it tells us very little new about modern society.

In the end, the book succeeds where it concentrates on building characters and luring the reader into their world. The observation of the eccentricities of colleagues and the lengths to which people will go to justify their working lives are funny and poignant and above all realistic. The political anti-consumerist message however, adds little and could easily be given less prominence.