The Lost Child

Set in part on the desolate moors of northern England, The Lost Child, Caryl Phillips’s haunting response to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, swept through me like a howling wind and, well, blew me away. In the tradition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (a wholly original prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, focused on the “madwoman in the attic”), Phillips imagines a convincingly nightmarish early childhood for Heathcliff before his rescue from the Liverpool docks by Mr. Earnshaw. It’s a tale of woe that provides a sympathetic explanation for the brutish behavior of Brontë’s love-thwarted antihero.

Phillips uses this grim Dickensian back-story to frame a moving novel about displacement and alienation in the twentieth century. The Lost Child centers on a bright young woman in mid-twentieth-century England who defies her rigid father by marrying a foreigner from “the islands” whom she meets at Oxford, where both have earned places against great odds. It’s the first of a cascade of poor decisions that sets Monica Johnson’s life on a downward spiral, with tragic consequences for her, her parents, and her two sons.

Mesmerized as I was by Phillips’s novel, I worried that it was too bleak to urge on book groups — until I reread Wuthering Heights  for the first time in decades. While familiarity with Brontë’s dark gothic masterpiece isn’t essential for an appreciation of The Lost Child, having it fresh in mind leads to a deeper grasp of just what a remarkable literary feat Phillips has pulled off by orchestrating the various counterpoints of this novel. It also throws into sharp relief Phillips’s great empathy for his characters. Without giving away too much, it’s safe to reassure readers that, as in Wuthering Heights, one of Phillips’s themes is the tenacity of the human spirit even in dreadful circumstances.

That said, The Lost Child raises a question worthy of discussion:  Why read bleak books when life and the news are filled with so much darkness? I’m betting that anyone who embraces serious fiction will have their own answers, but I want to emphasize that literature like The Lost Child and Wuthering Heights bring greater understanding of what it means to be human, and reminders that love isn’t always heartwarming — and in fact is often heartbreaking.

Phillips introduces heartbreak early in his novel, when a dying mother, a Congolese-born, former West Indian slave who has had to adapt to “a third homeland in one lifetime” — the port of Liverpool, teeming with “degraded humanity” — considers her seven-year-old son, the boy we realize will become Heathcliff. The ruined but once-“beguiling” woman sees “his wide eyes brimming with a concern that threatens to spill over into tears,” but she is relieved to detect “that a strong and tenacious heart beats in his tiny body.” And she further realizes, “This being the case, all is not lost.” Phillips ends the scene on this note of hope — albeit an ironic one, as readers of Wuthering Heights know that Heathcliff’s “strong and tenacious heart” will lead him to commit atrocities when he suffers his second great loss — Catherine Earnshaw’s marriage to Edgar Linton.

Phillips — who was born in St. Kitts, grew up in Liverpool, studied at Oxford, and now teaches English at Yale and lives in New York City — clearly understands the demands of adapting to multiple cultures in a single lifetime. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of numerous prizewinning books, including the novels A Distant Shore and Crossing the River, and the essay collection Color Me English.

The Lost Child is filled with characters who uneasily straddle cultures and grow up, like Heathcliff, in foster homes in which they feel unwelcome. Phillips explores the themes of displacement, not fitting in, and racism with subtlety and power. While in Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys gave Rochester’s wife Bertha Jamaican roots as a white Creole, Phillips reinterprets Heathcliff’s dark Gypsy features as part black. Monica’s husband, Julius Wilson, a graduate student attending Oxford on an unnamed “island scholarship,” is first drawn to her because she “made him feel safe and anchored in England.” But Monica recklessly gives up everything for him — not just ties to her parents but her education, and with it the promise of a better future. Their marriage, like others in this novel, is a study in alienation. Self-absorbed and pompous, Julius tries to become a player in his homeland’s independence movement, finally deciding to return “home.” Monica is left to bring up their two mixed-race sons as a single mother in grim town council flats in Leeds, a challenge for which she is woefully ill equipped.

Phillips’s novel teems not just with the displaced but with lost children, a rich thematic line for book groups to explore. These include Heathcliff, Monica and her sons, and the six children of Patrick and Maria Brontë, of whom Charlotte, who died at thirty-eight in 1855, lived the longest. Sibling relationships and their protectiveness of each other in the absence of adequate parenting is a related topic worthy of discussion. In a powerful break from Monica’s story, we see Charlotte Brontë nursing her dying sister Emily and mourning their profligate brother Branwell. Meanwhile, Monica’s firstborn, Ben, grows up with the double burden of feeling abandoned by his mother (“Why didn’t she try harder and put him first? Why didn’t she want him?”) and feeling guilty for failing to protect his abused younger brother, “our Tommy.” When the boys are sent on a two-week seaside vacation for disadvantaged children with their mother’s creepy boyfriend, Ben recalls, “Whenever I ran into [Tommy] at the camp, he looked like some little lost boy you wanted to hug. There was nothing in his eyes. No light, no nothing, but what was I meant to do, give him a pat on the head and a cuddly toy? He should have said something.”

Silence is anything but golden in The Lost Child: tamped-down, unspoken feelings are the isolating enemy of love, from Monica “steadfastly refusing to share any thoughts” with her father, her husband, or her sons, to her mother “locking away all her talk inside of herself” in order “to maintain what she assumed was a tolerable marriage.” Tommy can’t articulate what has traumatized him, while social workers and foster parents fail to adequately explain to Ben why he’s been separated from his mother.

Yet unlike Brontë’s tale of revenge, Phillips’s book is suffused with forgiveness. When Mr. Earnshaw decides to take “the scruffy lad” he will rename Heathcliff home with him across the stormy moors, his reflections on the boy’s mother could just as easily apply to poor Monica Johnson: “Despite her headstrong nature, it was evident to him that the woman was ill-suited to be a mother. It wasn’t her fault, but life had ushered her down a perilous course and delivered her into a place of vulnerability.” When Ben, collateral damage of that vulnerability, starts opening up, remembering the pop songs along with the pain from his miserable childhood, it’s a hopeful sign of “a strong and tenacious heart” — with no ironic overtones — in this consummately literary, deeply humane novel.