The Book Tower

When I was 20 I worked briefly as an assistant in a record shop. It was easily the worst job I’ve ever had; the oppressive concrete of Hammersmith Broadway, the rude, insistent, positively insane customers I had to face. And the odd types who work in record shops. And the sheer monotony of a job that somehow fails to meet the romanticism you first attach to it. So I was interested in reading Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, the first novel of a writer who’d endured the same job as me and chosen to set her debut work in a huge, sprawling shopping centre.

What Was Lost reminded me a lot of Jonathan Coe; similar in writing style and similar in how a mystery spanning two decades lies at its heart (although it’s years since I’ve read it, I was reminded a lot of Coe’s House of Sleep). O’Flynn’s mystery surrounds the disappearance of a young girl who, we learn from the opening chapters, daydreams through her waking hours as a would-be detective. Essentially we are in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time territory, but the novel begins to pick up speed when it jumps from 1984 to 2003. A long time after her mysterious disappearance we follow some of the shopping centre staff who are all, as you might expect, linked in some way to the girl.

Laura is our record shop assistant enduring the nightmare customers and staff, whose own brother also disappeared after being linked to the disappearance and questioned by the police. Kurt is a security guard, who sees a mysterious girl on the CCTV late a night, apparently lost in the empty, labyrinthine corridors. The novel manages to successfully combine humour with sadness; there are some very funny scenes surrounding Laura’s working days (her aggressive, burnt out colleague in the easy listening section is quite hilarious), and there are also many moments of dashed hopes and regret in Kurt’s background story. But best of all What Was Lost offers a very subtle and eerie ghost story, and whilst the solution of the “whodunnit” is not particularly surprising, the explanation of the “whydunnit” is very well constructed. A fine debut.