Lost & Found is the debut novel of the year in Australia (so far) and it’s a pearl. Brooke Davis, its 34-year-old West Australian author, is a little breathless with all the fuss — and who wouldn’t be? A week before the book’s launch in Australia, it had been sold into 25 countries to be translated into 20 languages for its overseas release next year. For comparable literary storms, think Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites or Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project — both Australian debut novels that sold all around the world in 2013.
Davis’ whimsically charming and deeply felt novel was sparked by the death of her mother in a freak car accident in 2006. She wrote the book as part of a PhD at Curtin University in Perth. An extract from an essay about finding words for her grief first published by Curtin — and which cites Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf and C. S. Lewis — forms a valuable postscript to the story.
What’s the big secret about death?
Seven-year-old Millie Bird (aka Captain Funeral) is hiding under a “Ginormous Women’s Underwear” rack in a department store and she’s confused. Her dad has recently died and her mum’s since abandoned her. She wonders: Why do adults give her books and seem to want her to know things but none has ever given her a book about Dead Things? What’s the big secret?
Eighty-two-year-old Agatha Pantha lives across the road from Millie and hasn’t left her house since her husband died seven years before. From her “Chair of Disbelief”, and hidden behind curtains and ivy, she shouts at passers-by. One of these is eighty-seven-year-old Karl, the Touch Typist who lost his wife to cancer and has absconded from the nursing home.
Agatha had previously seen the ambulance come, the white sheet on the stretcher and the neighbours rallying around Millie’s mother with their “thank-God-it-was-you-and-not-me food”. Karl has seen Millie under the rack in the department store.
Agatha and Karl soon realise, albeit somewhat reluctantly at first, that she’s a little girl alone who needs their help.
Along with physical support, what Millie really needs is people who will answer her questions about death and dying — and do it honestly.
When she asks a boy in a shop if he knows what a soul is he tells her it’s a kind of heart in your stomach that falls out when you die “like a placebo”.
Turns out he’s mixed up placebo up with placenta. And death with birth.
Turns out most adults have also been telling Millie a lot of hogwash about heaven and hell, trying to soften the blows of death because she’s a child.
Have I ever mattered?
Karl and Agatha have both lost their spouses and feel their own bodies losing vigour with age. Grief and mortality hover in their minds, too, prompting questions.
In the nursing home Karl wonders, “Have I ever mattered?”
When he hitches a lift with a young couple, he envies the boy’s body, girl, car and freedom. Then thinks, “Shouldn’t he [the boy] look at Karl and think, If only I get to lead a life like yours?”
Karl the Touch Typist had once used his fingers to tap love letters out on his wife’s skin.
It’s in the Nullarbor that he confirms that he’s not yet ready to lay down his desires and give in.
The international bestseller The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules has done much in recent times to humorously show that older people still want to lead interesting lives — and to have sex and love — despite their declining physical vigour and capacity.
I think Lost & Found charts this terrain with even more bravura and success.
Bringing grief close
Brooke Davis said in her essay that the word grief had been forced on her but then she chose to bring the word in close. Writing Lost & Found was a potent way to do this — with the characters helping her to explore and to speak of her loss.
“The question I was trying to answer as I was writing this novel was: ‘How do you live knowing that anyone you love can die at any moment?’” Davis said in a recent ABC interview.
“The whole novel, I think, became a process of me trying to work through that.”
Davis said she’d also tried to explore the question, “How do you get old without letting sadness become everything?”
That’s the main question that’s stayed with me since I finished the book — having read it on the heel of four months containing far too many deaths.
Words poured into measuring cups
Karl described his wife Evie as having “poured her words into measuring cups and flattening out the tops of them before she upended them into the world”.
He also said she had room for everybody: “She was always putting down her guns and raising her arms in the air, inviting a vulnerability that most couldn’t.”
Like Evie, Lost & Found combines thoughtfully crafted words with a refreshing vulnerability. It’s full of humour, too, which gives the work a remarkably light touch despite its darker themes.
Other strengths of the book include its huge zest for life and emphasis on the need for human kindness; some wonderful minor characters (Stella and Captain Everything were favourites); a truly gorgeous cover and just about the cutest book trailer ever whipped up in a few days at Davis’ behest by her creative friends.
So … Go. Seek. Lose. Find. Laugh …
I won’t tell you whether Agatha and Karl are wiser than other adults when it comes to answering death’s big questions … but I will say that Millie and these lovable oddball octogenarians get up to some hijinks.
I will say I really enjoyed going along with the trio on their ride.
This is one more book that needs to go with me.
I think it walks the fine line between cute and deep really well. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.
I surprised myself by how much I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was sad and profound and unputdownable.
Deserving of the hype