(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Imagination is a powerful thing.
In a world held fast by the often tight and deadening hand of grim, dark and soulless reality, the ability to imagine places, people and times that operate above and beyond the everyday is a salvation, a gift that allows us to give comforting and emotionally supportive form and function to often desperate, intangible hopes and dreams.
In The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer (The Wishing Game), we are treated to a powerful example of just how immensely important imagination can be, as three people grapple with a world that has caused them significant pain and grief and the possibility that beyond that lies something that can transform how they live their lives.
A fairytale for grown-ups in effect, The Lost Story is a curiously impactful mix of Narnia-esque wonderment and awe, the idea that just a shadow and glimmer beyond our own reality lies an altogether different one, and the brutally honest truth of how devastatingly terrible life can be for some people.
In this tale that bursts with fecund wonder and thrillingly alive and expansive imagination, so brilliantly vivacious that it feels like it will gallop off the pages you are reading with eager fervency, two boys go missing in the woods, presumably lost when they don’t reappear for some six months.
But reappear they do, even if they are unable to explain where they have been and what waylaid for such a gut-wrenching amount of time.
She [Emilie] called out after him. ‘If that was Ralph Howell’s body in Red Crow, would you walk away?’
He [Jeremy] stopped, but only for a second before doing just that.
Fifteen years on from this mysterious but miraculous event, the two lost boys, now men in their early thirties, are estranged.
Rafe, the quieter and more artistic of the two, lives as a recluse in the woods, his home decorated with fantastical art that suggests a vibrant but suppressed world well hidden somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, while Jeremy, avuncular and garrulous to a fault, is a famed locator of missing person drawing on a sixth sense that enables him to find people, living or dead, where almost all other people cannot.
Their estrangement is a tragedy, with the two men having lost a close knit friendship that had them acting like brothers; it takes the arrival Emilie Wendell, desperate, after the death of her beloved mother, to find her long-lost sister who disappeared in the same woods as Rafe and Jeremy some twenty years earlier.
The big secret of this warmly real story is that Jeremy knows precisely where they were and what happened to them; it’s why he is able to steer them all back to the place they left many years earlier, a place which has its genesis, rather amazingly, in the imagination of one teenage girl who needed somewhere to escape to where love
The Lost Story is as much about a return to this world after a long period away as it is about what it is like after so much loss, grief and emotional estrangement to finally find your people and to know they back your back no matter what comes your way.
(Photo credit: Chanel Nicole Co. / courtesy official author site)
Fiendishly, honestly dark and deeply unsettling in many ways, The Lost Story manages to be both magically hopefully and grimly truthful about the many abundantly wonderful but terrifyingly awful ways in which life manifests itself.
Returning to the Narnia part of the equation, The Lost Story presents a land in which you can endlessly and happily lose yourself.
Yes, there are dangers just as in there are in any world found through slips in time or out the back on non-descript wardrobes, and they must be faced in ways that will trouble the heart and truly test the soul, but there is also so much that defy logic and reality, the kind of magicality our world all too often lacks and which it turns out we often need to feel good about ourselves and our place in the world.
As Rafe, Jeremy and Emilie venture back into the hidden land just over the hill in the woods on the edge of the men’s hometown, it becomes abundantly clear that the heart is capable of some pretty amazing creations, that it is possible for us to conjure up places of wonder and truth and for them to become as real world as anything else we touch and feel.
Maybe that doesn’t happen in real life but the beauty of The Lost Story is that it demonstrates in ways that are truly affecting that we sculpt the reality we need when the one we have is manifestly short of what we should have and more than that, seems to be trying to destroy us at every turn.
Rafe looked at Jeremy. ‘You a prince too?’
‘What? Me? No.’
‘Oh yeah, because that would be ridiculous.’
‘It would,’ Jeremy said. ‘I’m a knight.’
If you have been through trauma of any kind, you will well understand how much we need to imagine a reality where all of the terrible things that assail us are bested by unconditional love, the warm embrace of selfless friendship and loyalty and honour that transcends the very worst that life can throw at us.
If, like this reviewer, you are bullied almost every single day of your school life, it makes sense that you would imagine a place where you are loved, where you are safe and where desperate, grasping hope has its frantic pleas for assistance answered.
So it is that Rafe, Jeremy and Emilie, who bond tightly as a found family that manages to shape the real world every bit as much as does the imagined truth of the land to which they journey, find answers where they thought there were none, in the whispers of some else’s heart that more than match the cries of their own.
Fantastically, wondrously, excitingly and movingly alive and bursting with so much vibrant imaginative heartfelt truth, The Lost Story is a truly special book that, while it acknowledges the horrific darknesses of life and the way in which it can twist itself and us into some truly damaged shapes, also offers the chance not simply of escape but of healing and of restoration and the possibility that what has been imagined and take magical form might also have a power in the real world, the one that has always mistreated but might be able to be changer for the better, too.