Nobody Move, This Is A Review: WHAT WAS LOST by Catherine O’Flynn

Catherine O’Flynn’s debut novel was first published way back in January 2007, but it recently won the Costa First Novel Award, a coup for its independent Birmingham-based publishers, Tindal Street Press. However, a year and a half later, the subject matter is still relevant and captures the zeitgeist, as it explores the impact that a missing child has on a community and various individuals 20 years after the event.
  O’Flynn divides her narrative into four separate parts, which skip from the voice of Kate Meaney, the 10-year-old amateur detective who vanishes without a trace from Green Oaks shopping centre in 1984, to those of Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at a chain music store, and Kurt a security guard who keeps seeing a little girl on the CCTV footage in the dead of night. Both live in 2004, and Kate’s disappearance has affected each in different ways.
  Disparate other voices are also interspersed into the main body of the story; all are anonymous, reflecting the centre’s unification but ultimate isolation of very different people.
  O’Flynn splices a variety of genres in WHAT WAS LOST: she successfully mixes crime tropes with those of literary and women’s fiction and the result is a touching, often funny, tale of love and loss within the sterile confines of a homogenous shopping centre and its fractured, post-consumerist community. – Claire Coughlan

A Murder Of Crowleys?

It’s been a good year for Catherine O’Flynn, folks. Not only did she scoop the Costa Award for best debut novel, she also won the Waterstone’s Newcomer of the Year in the Nibbies. Now comes the news that … oh, let’s allow the Irish Film and Television Network wallahs to tell it, shall we?

BAFTA and IFTA winning Irish director John Crowley (Boy A, Intermission) is attached to direct the screen adaptation of Catherine O’Flynn’s award winning novel WHAT WAS LOST. WHAT WAS LOST is the debut novel for Catherine O’Flynn. Published in January 2007, the book was longlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the prestigious First Novel prize at the Costa Book Awards in January 2008. The story centres upon the disappearance of a young girl in 1984 and the people who continue the search for her twenty years later. The Heyday Films / Film Four co-production is in the early stages of development with ‘Harry Potter’ producer David Heyman and co-producer Rosie Alison (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) behind optioning the project. A screenwriter is now being sought to adapt the story for the big screen.

Insert your own religious-themed punchline here, incorporating some or all of the phrases ‘WHAT WAS LOST now is found’, ‘the LOST shall be the first’, and ‘LOST soul redeemed’ …

Laugh? We Almost Emigrated. Again.

Irish crime fiction covers most of the bases, whether it’s harrowing noir (Ken Bruen), the male PI (Vincent Banville, Declan Hughes), the female PI (Ingrid Black, KT McCaffrey), the male-and-female PI (Arlene Hunt), the literary mystery novel (Liam Durcan, Benny Blanco, Eoin McNamee), the historical mystery (Cora Harrison), the supernatural mystery (John Connolly), the hardboiled pulp (John McFetridge, Seamus Smyth), the policier (Tana French, Brian McGilloway, Gene Kerrigan), the psycho slasher (Alex Barclay), the balls-out tough guy (Adrian McKinty). What we don’t do a lot of is humour, Colin Bateman being the notable exception that proves the rule. Interviewed by Rosy over at Vulpus Libris, Catherine O’Flynn, the author of WHAT WAS LOST, touches on why readers tend not to take humorous books seriously, to wit:

Q. It is a bit of a cliché but it is often said that prizes usually go to bleak books. Do you think that people misunderstand comedy / humour when it comes to things like awards?
A: “I don’t really know what goes on with awards, but perhaps some people feel a conflict between importance and humour. Maybe they feel that a book isn’t making serious points if it makes them smile. I’ve never found that humour in writing detracts from the bleakness or tragedy that might also be there. I think of writers I love like Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace and see their works combining humour and sadness and more. I’ve just read Joshua Ferris’s THEN WE CAME TO THE END and think it’s another excellent example.”

So, the absence of humour. Is it because crime is still seen as a very serious issue in Ireland? Is it that the psychic weight of Joyce, Beckett, et al means that business of writing is too serious to be taken lightly here? Or is it just that we don’t have a sense of humour? And will Garbhan Downey and Twenty Major sue because we didn’t mention them in tandem with Colin Bateman, in order to make a spurious point? There’s a free copy of Benny Blanco’s CHRISTINE FALLS (yep, we’re still trying to give it away) to the most penetrating insight. Or you could just tell us a joke. The comment box is open, people ...

In Like O’Flynn

The Grand Vizier would like to congratulate Catherine O’Flynn on her nomination in the Waterstone’s Newcomer of the Year in the Galaxy British Book Awards, as reported today in The Guardian. WHAT WAS LOST is not only garnering plenty of critical plaudits (the debut novel has already won a Costa Prize) but getting terrific word of mouth too, a hopefully dynamite combination for the little book that could. Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah for independent publishing.
  Elsewhere, however, the news was not so embiggening for Irish crime writers, with nary a sign of even a token nod to Norn Iron to sugar the pill. Admittedly, it’s a tough category, with Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, James Lee Burke, Patricia Cornwell and Lee Child duking it out in the Crime Thriller category. But are all five novels better than, say, Eoin McNamee’s 12:23? And is it the case that Irish crime fiction doesn’t get a fair shake in the UK, at least by comparison with the US, where this year’s NoirCon will be dedicated to Ken Bruen and there are three Irish writers up for Edgars? Brian McGilloway and Declan Hughes were nominated for a couple of Daggers last year, but generally speaking, Irish crime writers seem to fare better in the US than the UK. Is it because of the IRA? Seriously, you can tell us, we won’t take it personally.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: WHAT WAS LOST by Catherine O’Flynn

WHAT WAS LOST won the 2007 Costa First Novel prize and was long-listed for the Man Booker and Orange prizes. It’s a long while since I’ve read a book so well regarded by the literary critics, as, after all, I mostly read crime fiction, a genre unloved by the mainstream award givers. WHAT WAS LOST has perhaps sneaked under the judges’ radar as the mystery is pushed to the background for the major section of the novel and is mostly the catalyst for the other elements: the social commentary and the romance. It is a compelling novel and extremely readable.
  The book opens with a section told by ten-year-old Kate Meaney, a budding private investigator with her trusty stitched monkey toy as her assistant. Kate is very bright and spends a lot of time watching for crime at the Green Oaks shopping centre, a huge complex near Birmingham. She also spends time at the sweetshop next door to her home, discussing music with Adrian, the 22-year-old son of the owner. An orphan, she’s looked after (loosely speaking, it seems) by her grandmother, who wants Kate to attend a boarding school. Reluctantly Kate agrees to take the entrance exam. Adrian accompanies her to the school and that is the last anyone sees of Kate Meaney. She vanishes into thin air. Police suspicion falls on the strange relationship between Kate and Adrian and after all the gossip, Adrian leaves home, not to be seen again for 20 years.
  Jump forward 20 years to the Green Oaks Centre where we meet Lisa, a duty manager at Your Music, and Kurt, a security guard on the night shift. One night, Kurt sees a little girl on one of the CCTV monitors, a girl clutching a toy monkey. He is unable to find her though, and, later crossing paths with Lisa, she agrees to help him find her. Through their developing relationship, information long suppressed comes to the fore and helps solve the mystery of Kate Meaney.
  I couldn’t put WHAT WAS LOST down. As well as the Kate Meaney mystery, there’s a fascination to what goes on behind the scenes at a huge shopping mall; the poorly lit unpainted miles of corridors; what it sounds like when there’s no musak. The book also explores what Green Oaks meant to the local community, having been built on old factory sites and the men being forced to take menial (aka women’s) jobs, and also the current obsession with shopping. Green Oaks is as much a character as Lisa, Kurt and Kate, if not so likeable, and much of the action seems to take place in its gloomy depths. There’s also quite a lot of humour, unintentionally by Kate in her detective notebook and more obviously in Kurt’s dealings with his Green Oaks statistician security guard partner, and his attempts to avoid his eye and subsequent monologues.
  Reminiscent of Suzanne Berne’s A CRIME IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD, I much preferred WHAT WAS LOST, not least for the fact that you do get a resolution. A bonus pleasure was the references to places I’m familiar with, e.g. Sutton Park, that I rarely come across in fiction.
  An amazing debut novel. Catherine O’Flynn will be hard pushed to top the outstanding critical reception it has deservedly received. – Karen Meek

This review is republished with the kind permission of Euro Crime

On WHAT WAS LOST, And Losers

Sinead over at the very fine Sigla Blog has been raving about Catherine O’Flynn’s Costa Award-winning WHAT WAS LOST for some time now, but even though O’Flynn is second-generation Irish we didn’t want to jump on the bandwagon in case the novel was a literary effort (given it won a literary prize) that simply utilised crime tropes, an issue that has unduly exercised the elves of CAP Towers over the last few weeks. However, with Mark Lawson in The Guardian claiming WHAT WAS LOST as a mystery story, and Karen Meek reviewing it at Euro Crime, it’s starting to look like WHAT WAS LOST is due some very belated and entirely useless congratulations from the CAP crew. Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah, then … Incidentally, O’Flynn was one of four women to scoop a prize at the Costa Book Awards, and the utter absence of disgruntled men complaining about the (non-)issue stands in stark contrast to the outcry about the lack of women nominated for the Edgar’s ‘Best Novel’ category, if this Sarah Weinman-sponsored thread is anything to go by. Are men better losers than women? Or just losers, period? Answers on the back of a used €20 note to the usual address, please …

Corn On The Cobblers

Occasional CAP lurker Eimear gets in touch to bring us up to speed on the Joan Brady (not pictured, right) story, the poignant tale of the serious novelist who received an out-of-court settlement of £115,000 from a cobbler near her Totnes home on the basis that the fumes from the solvents used at the factory had caused her ‘physical distress and mental distraction’. Mark Lawson of The Guardian takes up the tale, to wit:

“One example given of her problems – and here we come to the reason that Brady should probably not walk down any dark alleys filled with crime writers – was that she had become so confused by the fumes that she was forced to abandon a serious novel, COOL WIND FROM THE FUTURE, and turn instead to mystery fiction, with BLEEDOUT …
  “And yet this is a strange time for the claim to be made, because the boundaries between the two sides of fiction – which we can loosely call literary and populist, although all of the terminology used in these debates tends to be pejorative – is visibly breaking down. The most recent books published by John Banville after winning the Man Booker prize are two detective novels. It can be argued that by publishing these under a pseudonym – Benjamin Black – he solidified the distinction between grim, prize-winning prose and serious paperback-selling stuff. But Doris Lessing, who wrote science fiction under her own name, has just taken the Nobel; and the Costa First Novel prize this year was won by a mystery story, Catherine O’Flynn’s WHAT WAS LOST (right), which isn’t bad for a fumehead …
  “The solution is that, as with non-crime fiction, we should make our generalisations only from the best. But the fumeheads will understandably be fuming about Brady’s remarks. Perhaps the only option is to establish a counter precedent in law, in which a best-selling crime writer argues in court that following a blow to the head or prescription of antidepressants, he was unable to pen anything except a poetically written Bildungsroman about the way that the PE teacher used to look at him. While any reader of her work will be pleased that Joan Brady has sorted out her problem with the cobbler, her attitude to crime fiction is, well, cobblers.”

Incidentally, BLEEDOUT sold in excess of 10,000 copies. Which may explain why Ms Brady is currently writing a follow-up. Well, it’s that or she’s still so bofto on the wowee fumes that she can’t distinguish between serious and genre fiction anymore. Tragic, we call it … Oh, and while we’re on the whole serious / genre thingagummy, here’s the link to the latest instalment of Benny Blanco’s THE LEMUR, currently being serialised in the New York Times.