The Lost Child
The Lost Child is several stories – it’s Monica’s and her son’s, framed within the Brontës’ world, and the narrative of Wuthering Heights. Phillips envisions a Congolese slave, who meets a ‘respectable’ gentleman in Liverpool, becomes pregnant (Heathcliff’s ‘dark, gypsy looks’) and, unable to find employment, succumbs to sickness and death, orphaning her 7-year-old son. This section is written in third person and is poignantly and tragically impersonal. To say more would be to reveal how Phillips pulls his threads into the whole; a mystery of sorts, I didn’t really ‘get it’ until the end.
We encounter Monica at Oxford in 1957, a gifted, rather invisible girl with no friends or social life. Estranged from her family, she meets Julian, a man from the islands (no coincidence), working on his dissertation and grateful, at the time, for the ‘security and purpose’ she offers him. Several years after marrying they are still stuck in a cramped London flat with two sons, no money and no prospects. Monica leads a ‘useless existence’ and Julian watches, with disarming disinterest, as his inscrutable wife retreats further inside her head. Unable to reconcile with him, Monica returns to Yorkshire with the boys.
This is a complex, multi-layered story of alienation, loneliness, disaffection and abandonment. It comes at you from all sides; from Heathcliff, Emily, Branwell and their father; Monica, her father, and her son, Ben, who narrates his mother’s downward spiral through mental illness into a kind of madness. Phillips juggles some difficult questions, and to find the germane connections in his work required (for me) a second reading. It’s a short book at 272 pages, but is full of the heartbreaking predicament of misfits and outcasts. You won’t walk away from this one unscathed, but I recommend it extremely highly.
