I think that maybe I've just read too much of this kind of novel; of course, making that statement is a lot easier than fleshing it out by identifying exactly what 'this kind' of novel is. Behind the Scenes at the Museum is one, and probably Human Croquet as well; so too The Sorrows of an American (soon to be reread for one of my book clubs, incidentally - looking forward to it!), and perhaps The Blind Assassin, in a slightly different way, and many others that I can't call to mind right now. What they all have in common is that, apart from being written in the last ten or fifteen years - which is certainly relevant - they're about loss (also, it only now strikes me, they're all by women, which may also be relevant), and they all deal with that subject in a certain way, characterised by attention to relationships, memory, and, especially, history --
-- and so it is with What Was Lost. O'Flynn's writing is clear, and has an understated quality which suits the story she tells - that of the disappearance of Kate Meaney, junior detective (age about nine, I think), and the effects of that disappearance on the later lives of several others from her town, much of it taking place in and around the shopping mall where her image is seen some nineteen years later by a security guard on the security camera screen at night, after the mall has closed.
There's a quiet sadness to it, balanced by intimations of hope, particularly in the way some of the characters relate to each other, but somehow it didn't catch alight for me, though I appreciated its craft and what it was doing. I can't entirely put my finger on what it is that didn't quite work (although something of it probably comes from a failure to adequately reconcile the generally low-key nature of the events and tone of the novel with the gaping absence which gives What Was Lost its key narrative and structural figure, leading to (a) the introduction of a culprit about halfway through who I picked in about two pages and (b) a rather forced reappearance of a relatively minor character near the end to knit things together. For all that, though, this is a good novel, particularly for a first novel (as it is), and I oughtn't fault it too much for being just the kind of thing that I know.
