What Was Lost

By Catherine O’Flynn. Anchor Canada, 256 pp, $22, softcover

If you’re one of those adults who isn’t sure how they feel about novels involving child detectives—namely, precocious children imagining they are detectives—you’ll just have to ditch your preconceptions.

And if the lonely 10-year-old at the mysterious centre of Catherine O’Flynn’s beautifully mesmerizing debut novel, What Was Lost, happens to have a stuffed monkey as her partner, what of it? Any novel that manages the trick of causing an actual physical ache in the chest—a sort of painful one-two thunk of heartbreak and dry wit—is worth getting over a cute little monkey dressed in a pinstriped gangster suit. Wearing spats.

Don’t go anywhere. You’ll be sorry.

Most of the uncomfortably numb adults in O’Flynn’s intricately constructed vision of Birmingham, England, don’t seem to be going anywhere—either in the early 1980s or, after a deft, sucker-punch jump in the story line, in 2003. In both eras, things aren’t exactly terrific.

In 1984, the bright spot in a grim landscape of working-class housing estates is in the intelligent, humorous headspace of young Kate Meaney. With a book called How to Be a Detective in hand, she searches for crime. Kate lurks in her neighbourhood—where she considers the children “inbred and violent”, but yearns to join their games—making unintentionally hilarious notations: “Friday 20th April No Mr. Tan today, but instead a woman with a suspiciously bad wig. Are they connected???” “16.03—cat goes to toilet in front garden.” Within this deceptively charming narrative is a deep compassion for a child whose resourcefulness belies abiding pain.

Here, the focus of pain is the Green Oaks shopping centre. Kate’s favourite surveillance site in ’84 becomes, 19 years after her unexplained disappearance, the locus of depressed adults “sleepwalking” through soulless jobs. “I’ve been lost here for years,” Lisa, a music-store manager, tells Kurt, a security guard.

Both are haunted and dulled by a tragedy they’re unable to fully comprehend, as well as a mystery O’Flynn orchestrates with exquisite sensitivity and eerie suspense. Inside the mall walls are “pockets of dead air” one character observes. “Little chambers of nothingness.” But across the nothingness, humans manage to connect.