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The Lost Child
Caryl Phillips reimagines Emily Bronte's melodramatic "Wuthering Heights", weaving the past and the present into a modern story of exile and difference.
Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its center is Monica Johnson - cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner - and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Phillips intertwines her modern narrative with the childhood of one of literature's most enigmatic lost boys, as he deftly conjures young Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights, and his ragged existence before Mr. Earnshaw brought him home to his family.
Written in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, The Lost Child is a multifaceted, deeply original response to Emily Bronte's masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. A critically acclaimed and sublimely talented storyteller, Caryl Phillips is "in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul" (Booklist) and "his novels have a way of growing on you, staying with you long after you've closed the book." (The New York Times Book Review) A true literary feat, The Lost Child recovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by transforming a classic into a profound story that is singularly its own.
Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its center is Monica Johnson - cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner - and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Phillips intertwines her modern narrative with the childhood of one of literature's most enigmatic lost boys, as he deftly conjures young Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights, and his ragged existence before Mr. Earnshaw brought him home to his family.
Written in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, The Lost Child is a multifaceted, deeply original response to Emily Bronte's masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. A critically acclaimed and sublimely talented storyteller, Caryl Phillips is "in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul" (Booklist) and "his novels have a way of growing on you, staying with you long after you've closed the book." (The New York Times Book Review) A true literary feat, The Lost Child recovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by transforming a classic into a profound story that is singularly its own.
260 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2015
35 people are currently reading
1114 people want to read
About the author
Caryl Phillips
53 books217 followers Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 105 reviews
June 21, 2018
i was so excited to read this book. i will read any book that uses Wuthering Heights as its jumping-off point, and since i have been meaning to read caryl phillips for a long time this seemed to be a perfect opportunity. but if you are like me, and reading this for the WH bits, don't expect this to scratch that itch. yes, there are a couple of chapters that imagine the early life and "rescue" of heathcliff by mr. earnshaw, and it ends with heathcliff's arrival on the moors where the great tragedy of Wuthering Heights will begin, and there is a chapter or two about the brontës, but the bulk of the story is about an english woman named monica in the 1960's, making her family proud by winning a place at oxford against all expectations and then throwing it all away by dropping out to marry julian - an older graduate student from a never-named caribbean island. her decision estranges her from her family, and her story is of the disappointments and tragedies that she and her two children endure when her marriage doesn't pan out.
the parallels between WH and monica's stories are not numerous. julian and monica's relationship has none of the wild passion of catherine and heathcliff, and while neither of them are sympathetic characters, their shortcomings are pedestrian compared to the gothic rages of catherine and heathcliff. catherine is headstrong while monica is fragile and defeated - both are self-destructive and both make bad decisions in love, but monica's descent from brilliant student to frazzled single mother is bland in comparison. catherine would never fret about what to wear to a club.
the story is largely told from the perspective of monica's eldest son ben. like heathcliff, he is biracial in a sea of white faces, and even though he was born english, he is still marginalized and considered an outsider. like heathcliff, the moors will feature in his life, but with none of their omnipresent oppressiveness that characterizes Wuthering Heights. like heathcliff, he is sent to live with a foster family, but there is no catherine for him, and no trace of the inner darkness that pretty much defines heathcliff.
phillips' writing is beautiful, and his story packs an emotional wallop, but no matter how you frame it, this isn't really a satisfying companion story to WH. he has taken Wuthering Heights and removed its central focus - the romance, and chosen to linger over its less-developed ideas of colonialism, racism, outsider status, and the way a family can shatter. which are definitely present in Wuthering Heights, but they're not the salient themes, and WH wouldn't be my first thought if presented with those words and asked to name the book.
there are small instances of overlap between monica and heathcliff's story - location, madness, isolation, loneliness, poverty, sexual abuse; but much of that is overlap with phillips' imagined origin story of heathcliff, not with what is actually in the source material. (i'll give you isolation, loneliness and madness, but the madness in WH is very specific and not the clinical mental illness of this novel.)
the tragic failures here are mainly failures of society; the way the system fails children after their parents fail them, whereas the drama in WH is enabled by the absence of society - everything happens in this seemingly vast expanse of moors but within a much smaller emotional bell jar in which a hurricane rages. had catherine been exposed to society, and like, met more dudes, things may have turned out differently. the isolation of WH is a physical isolation; in this novel, isolation is an abstraction of no one being willing to help these suffering characters. they are both bleak and devastating stories, but it's not always easy to understand their connection.
phillips takes the subtextual assumption that heathcliff was earnshaw's natural son (so take THAT, guy who was arguing with me on my The House of Dead Maids thread) and runs with it, portraying heathcliff's squalid surroundings and his mother's decline as the result of earnshaw's misguided good intentions. the detail of why he didn't allow them to go back home was one of those perfect literary moments - a decision made in shortsighted kindness that only invites tragedy. a lovely little heartpunch.
and monica's decline is also heartbreaking, if less inevitable. we don't get enough insight into her thinking to really understand how her story turned out the way it did. the beginning of her story is meticulously described - her squandered intellectual opportunities and her pride preventing her from turning to her family after her father disowned her (oh, and HIS story - wow, that was another heartpunch and probably my favorite part of this book), her struggle to raise her two sons on a librarian's salary, and her search to find a place to feel like she belonged and she mattered. and the end of her story is also made explicit - the series of events that occurred to lead her to … the end of her storyline. but there's this whole frustratingly muddy middle part where you can see the shine of point a and the tarnish of point b, but the gradation of a to b is unclear.
ultimately, the competing narratives never came together for me, and their supposed connections were a bit of a stretch, but i think his writing is gorgeous, and i definitely want to read something else by him; something unrelated to a novel i have such strong feelings about.
one more thing, and this is spoiler-land, so beware:
come to my blog!
the parallels between WH and monica's stories are not numerous. julian and monica's relationship has none of the wild passion of catherine and heathcliff, and while neither of them are sympathetic characters, their shortcomings are pedestrian compared to the gothic rages of catherine and heathcliff. catherine is headstrong while monica is fragile and defeated - both are self-destructive and both make bad decisions in love, but monica's descent from brilliant student to frazzled single mother is bland in comparison. catherine would never fret about what to wear to a club.
the story is largely told from the perspective of monica's eldest son ben. like heathcliff, he is biracial in a sea of white faces, and even though he was born english, he is still marginalized and considered an outsider. like heathcliff, the moors will feature in his life, but with none of their omnipresent oppressiveness that characterizes Wuthering Heights. like heathcliff, he is sent to live with a foster family, but there is no catherine for him, and no trace of the inner darkness that pretty much defines heathcliff.
phillips' writing is beautiful, and his story packs an emotional wallop, but no matter how you frame it, this isn't really a satisfying companion story to WH. he has taken Wuthering Heights and removed its central focus - the romance, and chosen to linger over its less-developed ideas of colonialism, racism, outsider status, and the way a family can shatter. which are definitely present in Wuthering Heights, but they're not the salient themes, and WH wouldn't be my first thought if presented with those words and asked to name the book.
there are small instances of overlap between monica and heathcliff's story - location, madness, isolation, loneliness, poverty, sexual abuse; but much of that is overlap with phillips' imagined origin story of heathcliff, not with what is actually in the source material. (i'll give you isolation, loneliness and madness, but the madness in WH is very specific and not the clinical mental illness of this novel.)
the tragic failures here are mainly failures of society; the way the system fails children after their parents fail them, whereas the drama in WH is enabled by the absence of society - everything happens in this seemingly vast expanse of moors but within a much smaller emotional bell jar in which a hurricane rages. had catherine been exposed to society, and like, met more dudes, things may have turned out differently. the isolation of WH is a physical isolation; in this novel, isolation is an abstraction of no one being willing to help these suffering characters. they are both bleak and devastating stories, but it's not always easy to understand their connection.
phillips takes the subtextual assumption that heathcliff was earnshaw's natural son (so take THAT, guy who was arguing with me on my The House of Dead Maids thread) and runs with it, portraying heathcliff's squalid surroundings and his mother's decline as the result of earnshaw's misguided good intentions. the detail of why he didn't allow them to go back home was one of those perfect literary moments - a decision made in shortsighted kindness that only invites tragedy. a lovely little heartpunch.
and monica's decline is also heartbreaking, if less inevitable. we don't get enough insight into her thinking to really understand how her story turned out the way it did. the beginning of her story is meticulously described - her squandered intellectual opportunities and her pride preventing her from turning to her family after her father disowned her (oh, and HIS story - wow, that was another heartpunch and probably my favorite part of this book), her struggle to raise her two sons on a librarian's salary, and her search to find a place to feel like she belonged and she mattered. and the end of her story is also made explicit - the series of events that occurred to lead her to … the end of her storyline. but there's this whole frustratingly muddy middle part where you can see the shine of point a and the tarnish of point b, but the gradation of a to b is unclear.
ultimately, the competing narratives never came together for me, and their supposed connections were a bit of a stretch, but i think his writing is gorgeous, and i definitely want to read something else by him; something unrelated to a novel i have such strong feelings about.
one more thing, and this is spoiler-land, so beware:
come to my blog!
March 24, 2021
Caryl Philips is a wonderful writer. He has a gift for tone and archaic (seemingly lost) forms of diction. This is a contrivance, no question. And it’s not always the shortest road to Rome. But it’s generally used with such skill that the rhetoric vanishes as one is carried by the story.
His novels often have a multistory structure, as this one does. Switching narrators and points of view. He’s not interested in chronology but in its subversion, though this particular book is more straightforward than some.
The hatred these characters bear for each other, and themselves; it’s staggering. It poisons their souls. It’s not sustainable. Its depiction is so engrossing that one feels emotionally exhausted when it’s over.
Phillips’s narrators tend to be reliable, though one character here, Monica, who’s world is collapsing, seems an exception. Phillips’s best books deal with slavery, post-colonialism, and the fate of the African diaspora. I especially like this one, Cambridge, Crossing the River, A Distant Shore, and The Nature of Blood.
Quibbles: Why not simply call the persons of color here persons of color? Instead the writer hints and alludes to curly hair etc. It’s just one of hundreds of esthetic choices the author makes, but, I wonder if it doesn’t make the depictions less substantial?
Another annoyance is the Faulknerian choice to open a given section merely with a pronoun and let the reader float along for pages until it’s finally revealed who we are reading about. Faulkner‘s trick was to use “it.” One wouldn’t mind this so much once in a while, but it seems to be used in every chapter.
His novels often have a multistory structure, as this one does. Switching narrators and points of view. He’s not interested in chronology but in its subversion, though this particular book is more straightforward than some.
The hatred these characters bear for each other, and themselves; it’s staggering. It poisons their souls. It’s not sustainable. Its depiction is so engrossing that one feels emotionally exhausted when it’s over.
Phillips’s narrators tend to be reliable, though one character here, Monica, who’s world is collapsing, seems an exception. Phillips’s best books deal with slavery, post-colonialism, and the fate of the African diaspora. I especially like this one, Cambridge, Crossing the River, A Distant Shore, and The Nature of Blood.
Quibbles: Why not simply call the persons of color here persons of color? Instead the writer hints and alludes to curly hair etc. It’s just one of hundreds of esthetic choices the author makes, but, I wonder if it doesn’t make the depictions less substantial?
Another annoyance is the Faulknerian choice to open a given section merely with a pronoun and let the reader float along for pages until it’s finally revealed who we are reading about. Faulkner‘s trick was to use “it.” One wouldn’t mind this so much once in a while, but it seems to be used in every chapter.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 30, 2018
I think it's a bit of false advertising for the publisher to call this book a re-imagining of Emily Bronte's masterpiece. The writing is beautiful and the sense of place is outstanding, but at the end of the day--or better said, at the end of the reading--I came away feeling that the book was neither fish nor fowl. It's much more of the modern day story than it is about the Bronte story, so for readers expecting a retelling of Wuthering Heights--perhaps from the POV of Heathcliff or one of minor characters or even from the POV of a character mentioned only in passing--then I would give this a pass. But if you like to wrangle a story to the earth in order to make sense of what the author is actually attempting, this is the book for you.
November 21, 2015
This book starts with a story of an enslaved woman who is abused, dies, and leaves a son. It jumps from that time frame to Oxford, England, in 1957, to introduce a university student in her second year by the name of Monica Johnson who is about to be disowned by her father for dating a foreign.
The book takes you through the life of Monica Johnson from childhood, puberty, adulthood, marriage, mother of two boys, divorce, estranged parents, poverty, death of a son, mental break down, hospitalization, disillusionment, and finally death. As you travel through Monica's life, it is not a straight forward journey. This book was well written and leaves you captivated about mental health issues and beckons to question. Can more be done for the mentally ill? Was this tragedy necessary?
Quotes:
It is clear that the conflict will soon be at an end, so he will not reenter her delicate body.
I remember losing Tommy, and the hospital, and then Bridlington, and Christmas Eve at the Mecca, and then trying to see Ben, and Denise getting rid of me, and the useless branch library, and catching the train to London.
The book takes you through the life of Monica Johnson from childhood, puberty, adulthood, marriage, mother of two boys, divorce, estranged parents, poverty, death of a son, mental break down, hospitalization, disillusionment, and finally death. As you travel through Monica's life, it is not a straight forward journey. This book was well written and leaves you captivated about mental health issues and beckons to question. Can more be done for the mentally ill? Was this tragedy necessary?
Quotes:
It is clear that the conflict will soon be at an end, so he will not reenter her delicate body.
I remember losing Tommy, and the hospital, and then Bridlington, and Christmas Eve at the Mecca, and then trying to see Ben, and Denise getting rid of me, and the useless branch library, and catching the train to London.
May 10, 2016
Lost boys. And I’m not talking vampires or Peter Pan, but truly lost children.
An interesting book to read beside and following Lullabies for Little Criminals. Both books examine the situation of the child from an unprivileged upbringing, but I found that LfLC left me with a more hopeful feeling.
This book was Bronte inspired—there are chapters re-imagining the situation of Heathcliff and there is one chapter devoted to Emily and Charlotte. It examines hardship from three directions, really. The hardship of the poor clergyman’s children, struggling to make ends meet and survive on the moors. (By all accounts, the Bronte daughters despised teaching children, the only option besides writing that was available to them). Their brother, Branwell, is depicted as lost in alcoholism and ill health.
Then there is the story of Monica and her two sons, Ben and Tommy. This is the meat of the book, as an increasingly erratic and alcoholic mother loses her sons even while she is living with them (one literally, one emotionally). Their father, from some unnamed Caribbean country, leaves them only their mixed-racial heritage and some talent for football and is also a “lost boy” in some regards.
Combining the two are the chapters featuring Heathcliff, the abandoned child—also with dark skin & hair, rejected for his ethnicity. Mistreated by the family he is adopted into after his sponsor’s death, just as Ben and Tommy are bullied by the fortunate children in school. Emily’s obsession, even as she sinks away towards her death.
This novel is dark and brooding as the moors that Wuthering Heights is famous for. And although there seems to be some prospect of escape for those who remain, the survivors are few.
An interesting book to read beside and following Lullabies for Little Criminals. Both books examine the situation of the child from an unprivileged upbringing, but I found that LfLC left me with a more hopeful feeling.
This book was Bronte inspired—there are chapters re-imagining the situation of Heathcliff and there is one chapter devoted to Emily and Charlotte. It examines hardship from three directions, really. The hardship of the poor clergyman’s children, struggling to make ends meet and survive on the moors. (By all accounts, the Bronte daughters despised teaching children, the only option besides writing that was available to them). Their brother, Branwell, is depicted as lost in alcoholism and ill health.
Then there is the story of Monica and her two sons, Ben and Tommy. This is the meat of the book, as an increasingly erratic and alcoholic mother loses her sons even while she is living with them (one literally, one emotionally). Their father, from some unnamed Caribbean country, leaves them only their mixed-racial heritage and some talent for football and is also a “lost boy” in some regards.
Combining the two are the chapters featuring Heathcliff, the abandoned child—also with dark skin & hair, rejected for his ethnicity. Mistreated by the family he is adopted into after his sponsor’s death, just as Ben and Tommy are bullied by the fortunate children in school. Emily’s obsession, even as she sinks away towards her death.
This novel is dark and brooding as the moors that Wuthering Heights is famous for. And although there seems to be some prospect of escape for those who remain, the survivors are few.
March 16, 2015
I made it to part III, though I'd had enough of this mangled tale of woe by part II. If anything, it was overwritten, as if the author was thinking, "How many words can I use and still make sense?" I had trouble following the story. The female characters were largely discounted and voiceless, and the male characters were so self-centered and arrogant that I could only stomach so much and quit while I was ahead. Talk about misogynistic!
So I'm done reading this terribly written book. Thank goodness!
So I'm done reading this terribly written book. Thank goodness!
July 3, 2015
This would have been an easy 5 stars except for the short insertion of 2 separate story lines, out of nowhere, into the plot. Most people are familiar with Wuthering Heights so it wasn't hard to figure out Heathcliff, but many people may not be as familiar with the lives of the Bronte sisters (I only am because I read a great novel about them years ago)and therefore I'm sure were left very confused. I had to read the NYT review of the book to figure out what these two separate stories had to do with anything and even then I didn't quite get it (although the book was reviewed very favorably).
So now in addition to plots going backwards and forwards and sideways, they're now also going to include irrelevant (from my perspective anyway), boring (sorry but it was) made-up storylines from other books we're supposed to have read in order to understand them? Long ago a friend told me he really liked a book saying "it had a beginning, a middle, and an ending" and I thought, "what the heck kind of stupid comment is that? All books have a beginning, a middle, and an ending!" Well, now I get it!
Since I really actually loved this book I'm going to seek out some of this wonderful author's earlier books which I'm guessing will be fantastic and far less frustrating for little old conventional me...
So now in addition to plots going backwards and forwards and sideways, they're now also going to include irrelevant (from my perspective anyway), boring (sorry but it was) made-up storylines from other books we're supposed to have read in order to understand them? Long ago a friend told me he really liked a book saying "it had a beginning, a middle, and an ending" and I thought, "what the heck kind of stupid comment is that? All books have a beginning, a middle, and an ending!" Well, now I get it!
Since I really actually loved this book I'm going to seek out some of this wonderful author's earlier books which I'm guessing will be fantastic and far less frustrating for little old conventional me...
April 29, 2015
I don't think I understood this book at all. I felt like the story went around in circles. I thought the prologue was really good, but I didn't see what it had to do with the main characters (Monica, Ben, and Tommy). Those three characters were the main part of the book. I don't know who Emily was. Joseph I guess was the father of the kid in the prologue, but those two characters had only one chapter. The words also made it really hard to read. I don't know, I feel like the story went around in circles because I didn't know what was going on half of the time.
April 12, 2015
This book is very complex and hard to follow at times but really worth the effort. It weaves together several different family stories that all have the same themes. It is interesting how the characters in Wuthering Heights as well as the Bronte sisters themselves get thrown into the mix. the author doesn't explain everything but leaves some explanations to the reader's imagination. it probably should be read twice
March 28, 2015
"The Lost Child" is about a number of lost people, in all ages of life. A book of depth, tragedy and loss, it touched me in so many ways. It's really difficult to love without great amounts of forgiveness. Much of the lostness in life (and this book) is related to anger, fear and unforgiveness. Will we ever learn?
March 4, 2016
I decided to go with one of the lowest rated on my to-read list for my 2015 book challenge "A book with Low reviews" it has an average rating of 3.18 on Goodreads. This book had potential but lacked flow to me. I enjoyed the main story line of Monica and her family but didn't feel the other stories/characters blended together at all and left me feeling more confused than anything.
March 5, 2025
"However, while she waited, she once again climbed the short, steep staircase of her imagination, and again found herself dreaming of the boy who came from the moors, and she listened to the sound of pebble-dashed soil drumming hard against the lid of a plain coffin, and she turned over and curled up in her mind and began to search for the boy."
This is a complex read, with four narratives that revisit, rewrite and evoke the haunting and harrowing story of Wuthering Heights. From a dark beginning of a destitute mother and child in the aftermaths of slave trade, the novels splits its depiction of Heathcliff, Mr Earnshaw, Nelly Dean and Catherine from the novel into a variety of lost boys, heartbroken mothers and vengeful, brooding fathers. The narratives switches between a prequel to Wuthering Heights, as we see Mr Earnshaw adopt Heathcliff, to a brief biographical narrative about the author herself being haunted by her creation of heathcliff to the 1960s narrative of racial divide and discrimination, where young Monica raises her mixed-race children with her unaffectionate husband, Julius Wilson.
I was suprised to read reviews that say the link to Wuthering Heights is a stretch because I find the connection to be overwhelmingly present. In addition to quite literally naming the characters and replicating scenes, Philips has managed to evoke the novel's dense fog and the disquieting moors haunt even in the most urban and domestic settings. It is not a direct rewrite and not as easily mapped onto Wuthering Heights, with sudden unannounced narrative switches making it at times a little difficult to keep track of where we are and when but I think that makes it even better. Philips has stretched the hauntings of the novel beyond its setting by for instance splitting the complexity of Heathcliff into a transgenerational battle with racism, discrimination and the brooding darkness that surfaces in a host of lost boys throughout the novel.
I loved it, the prose is gorgeous and I would highly recommend it for any fans of the original novel. The likeness is uncanny, providing you can let go of needing direct replicas of characters and allow yourself to get swallowed by what is an excellent and affective revisitation of everything Wuthering Heights evoked and more.
This is a complex read, with four narratives that revisit, rewrite and evoke the haunting and harrowing story of Wuthering Heights. From a dark beginning of a destitute mother and child in the aftermaths of slave trade, the novels splits its depiction of Heathcliff, Mr Earnshaw, Nelly Dean and Catherine from the novel into a variety of lost boys, heartbroken mothers and vengeful, brooding fathers. The narratives switches between a prequel to Wuthering Heights, as we see Mr Earnshaw adopt Heathcliff, to a brief biographical narrative about the author herself being haunted by her creation of heathcliff to the 1960s narrative of racial divide and discrimination, where young Monica raises her mixed-race children with her unaffectionate husband, Julius Wilson.
I was suprised to read reviews that say the link to Wuthering Heights is a stretch because I find the connection to be overwhelmingly present. In addition to quite literally naming the characters and replicating scenes, Philips has managed to evoke the novel's dense fog and the disquieting moors haunt even in the most urban and domestic settings. It is not a direct rewrite and not as easily mapped onto Wuthering Heights, with sudden unannounced narrative switches making it at times a little difficult to keep track of where we are and when but I think that makes it even better. Philips has stretched the hauntings of the novel beyond its setting by for instance splitting the complexity of Heathcliff into a transgenerational battle with racism, discrimination and the brooding darkness that surfaces in a host of lost boys throughout the novel.
I loved it, the prose is gorgeous and I would highly recommend it for any fans of the original novel. The likeness is uncanny, providing you can let go of needing direct replicas of characters and allow yourself to get swallowed by what is an excellent and affective revisitation of everything Wuthering Heights evoked and more.
February 1, 2021
This book shouldn't exist - not only because it is poorly written but also because it is doing the opposite of what it is intending to do. What makes Heathcliff such an interesting character is that we don't know his true origins nor what he did during the time that he ran away. This book is just a poorly-written adaptation with a needless backstory. The book is written nearly entirely in the passive voice. Every sentence is a chore. I would have dropped this book in the first couple pages if I didn't have to read it for uni. Here is an example of a sentence:
"Pamela was sitting at the kitchen table and had already helped herself to a small glass of brandy from the bottle that Monica kept in the cupboard to the side of the stove in case she ever needed some for cooking."
Now imagine 8-10 sentences like that lined up on a page and each page like that spanning 250 pages. There is no immediacy to any of the language. When reading the words I am always watching myself reading them rather than purely reading - there is zero immersion. He uses some actual visual imagery and I think maybe a simile in the prologue (which is the best part of the book and only sub-par) but the rest of the book is like reading a mildly depressing shopping list. I hope that this author realises he's a failure before he dies.
It also annoys me that Phillips focuses on the least interesting aspect of Heathcliff, his race, and then ruins that part of him as much as he has the entire mystery of the character. Heathcliff is described as black, a gypsy, Chinese and Indian - black for slave abolition, Chinese for the Opium War, Indian for the Britain's occupation of India but chiefly a gypsy, what he is called three times before any other race, so called due to the Irish Potato Famine. Heathcliff is there to represent different races taking revenge back on an English population, at least that is one reading of it. (Some people argue that the Potato Famine is genocide on Britain's art due to not helping when they could have - I don't know enough about it to comment.) (In this book Tommy is 1/4 black (Congolese) and 3/4 white.) There's also none of the mythological/theological aspects seen in this book compared to Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff and Catherine making their own Eden in the Moors, Catherine being bitten at Thrushcross and recognising her savagery in which she returns better clothed, Catherine's dream, the Miltonic illusions, et cetera) leads me to think that Phillips has not only no talent nor brain but also no basic care for what is important in this world.
I'm going to burn this book when I don't need it for uni. I read the first 73 pages in 2 hours or so. That is enough. I genuinely wanted to like this book and gave it enough chances but it is like drinking someone else's spit; that is what every sentence reminds me of - unflavoured saliva. Just awful - this book is not a book.
"Pamela was sitting at the kitchen table and had already helped herself to a small glass of brandy from the bottle that Monica kept in the cupboard to the side of the stove in case she ever needed some for cooking."
Now imagine 8-10 sentences like that lined up on a page and each page like that spanning 250 pages. There is no immediacy to any of the language. When reading the words I am always watching myself reading them rather than purely reading - there is zero immersion. He uses some actual visual imagery and I think maybe a simile in the prologue (which is the best part of the book and only sub-par) but the rest of the book is like reading a mildly depressing shopping list. I hope that this author realises he's a failure before he dies.
It also annoys me that Phillips focuses on the least interesting aspect of Heathcliff, his race, and then ruins that part of him as much as he has the entire mystery of the character. Heathcliff is described as black, a gypsy, Chinese and Indian - black for slave abolition, Chinese for the Opium War, Indian for the Britain's occupation of India but chiefly a gypsy, what he is called three times before any other race, so called due to the Irish Potato Famine. Heathcliff is there to represent different races taking revenge back on an English population, at least that is one reading of it. (Some people argue that the Potato Famine is genocide on Britain's art due to not helping when they could have - I don't know enough about it to comment.) (In this book Tommy is 1/4 black (Congolese) and 3/4 white.) There's also none of the mythological/theological aspects seen in this book compared to Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff and Catherine making their own Eden in the Moors, Catherine being bitten at Thrushcross and recognising her savagery in which she returns better clothed, Catherine's dream, the Miltonic illusions, et cetera) leads me to think that Phillips has not only no talent nor brain but also no basic care for what is important in this world.
I'm going to burn this book when I don't need it for uni. I read the first 73 pages in 2 hours or so. That is enough. I genuinely wanted to like this book and gave it enough chances but it is like drinking someone else's spit; that is what every sentence reminds me of - unflavoured saliva. Just awful - this book is not a book.
April 29, 2015
A polyphonic narrative that shows the rearing and destruction of children of all kinds - and how racist thoughts ever so subtly (perhaps more subtly here than in any other novel I've read) permeate actions and tear down relationships.
On the periphery are Phillips's reimagined life of Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights coming to the English moors and Branwell Brontë's decay in a family of such literary stars (ahem, Anne - Charlotte - Emily). Central is Phillips's fictional project: a woman, Monica, whose father breaks relations with her because she's giving up her studies at Oxford to move in with this DPhil student. It's hinted that these breaks are more fueled by the fact that this DPhil student is black, a Caribbean man who eventually has more interest in his homeland's problems than on the family he built with Monica.
Monica's whirlwind fall from grace is then thrown on to her two (mixed-race) sons, who have trials and tribulations (one even so unspeakable the narrative actually refuses to speak of it) only exasperated due to misplaced and/or absent love or racial hatred (that's also so unspeakable that the narrative evades it too). Slowly this work finds its footing. It took a very long while for me to appreciate the effect.
On the periphery are Phillips's reimagined life of Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights coming to the English moors and Branwell Brontë's decay in a family of such literary stars (ahem, Anne - Charlotte - Emily). Central is Phillips's fictional project: a woman, Monica, whose father breaks relations with her because she's giving up her studies at Oxford to move in with this DPhil student. It's hinted that these breaks are more fueled by the fact that this DPhil student is black, a Caribbean man who eventually has more interest in his homeland's problems than on the family he built with Monica.
Monica's whirlwind fall from grace is then thrown on to her two (mixed-race) sons, who have trials and tribulations (one even so unspeakable the narrative actually refuses to speak of it) only exasperated due to misplaced and/or absent love or racial hatred (that's also so unspeakable that the narrative evades it too). Slowly this work finds its footing. It took a very long while for me to appreciate the effect.
December 4, 2018
This is the first of Phillips's books I've read, on recommendation from a colleague I met at a conference this fall. The Lost Child unfolded very gradually, and it wasn't until the end, once I had the big picture, that I realized how intentionally and effectively he had crafted parallel narratives of Emily Bronte's life, the lives of her characters, and the lives of people in twentieth-century England. It's quite marvelous.
November 9, 2023
Just a little bit heavy-handed I think. I liked lots of what was there, there were some deeply sympathetic characters in this but the Bronte allusions were a bit too intense. I feel like we could have probably picked up on the Wuthering Heights references without the chapters directly written from the Bronte's POV.
October 1, 2023
Less of an adaptation of Wuthering Heights than a commentary on many of the same themes: family, abuse, domestic violence, mental health, generational trauma. Phillips has crafted a heart-breaking story at once entirely its own and haunted by the same ghosts. Loved this!
March 20, 2021
Read for uni 📚
November 7, 2015
The May 31, 2015 review by "Karen" eloquently and thoroughly captures my reaction and thoughts. While the parallels drawn between Wuthering Heights and Monica's tale don't work well, Caryl Phillips is an evocative and thoughtful writer taking on issues of race, and I look forward to reading more by him.
July 27, 2017
Beautiful, ornate prose about several disconnected threads that never come together in a knot. It seems to want to provide some backstory on Heathcliff, but is so muddled it can decide what it wants to be.
It would have been 1 star were it not for the writing.
It would have been 1 star were it not for the writing.
December 22, 2015
Perhaps I had expected something on the order of Wide Sargasso Sea. That is a tall order. I was disappointed.
December 28, 2021
The publisher’s blurb suggests that Phillips has “deftly intertwined” Heathcliff’s storyline with those of his 1960’s protagonists. This is misleading: it’s much more sophisticated than that.
Readers who are desperate for this to be a straightforward allegorical reworking of Wuthering Heights will be disappointed, as will those who are attempting to map the characters’ trajectories in a linear fashion. Instead, the fragmentation of narrative voices and disjointed juxtapositions create the effect of shattered mirrors reflecting shards of one another, through themes of brokenness, loneliness and self observation.
Intertextuality is blended with meta narrative in a central (ish) chapter about the Brontës themselves, ostensibly the wellspring of ‘Lost Child’ characters. Yet here too we sense that the dark and brooding backdrop of the moors is the binding underlying threat; both a symbol of the untameable id, the unconscious place of freedom or death of the controlling superego, and simultaneously the literal locus of the darkest deed which leads to the unravelling of Monica’s mind.
Heathcliff pounds across these same moors in the final chapters, dragging a terrified child “home”: is he the egocentric antagonist in the end? Or are we reading his chapter through Monica’s wildly unreliable narration?
I got the distinct impression, as the jagged plot progressed, that we are experiencing Monica’s reading of Wuthering Heights. The clues are there - she is a librarian and she loves reading; but the chaos of her addiction to alcohol and the loss of her son have driven her away from reality and into text.
The lost child is Monica who is also Heathcliff, dragging a son back home, tragically too late for any restoration of normality: “The boy looks into the man’s face, and again he asks him to please take him to his mother. Home.”
The issue of ‘race’ is peripheral, and dealt with lightly by Phillips. Racism is present and presented, but is not the point - guess what: an author of colour does not always have to bang on about ‘race’. Again, Phillips is way beyond thumping us over the head with the obvious and is more interested in fracturing form and narrative. This in itself could be read as a postcolonial deconstruction of “plot”, if you do want to go there; a critical seam which could be productively mined.
For me though, the intertextual difficulty and entanglement is the challenge which most successfully plunges us into Monica’s desolated psyche and surfaces the tragedy of her lost child.
Readers who are desperate for this to be a straightforward allegorical reworking of Wuthering Heights will be disappointed, as will those who are attempting to map the characters’ trajectories in a linear fashion. Instead, the fragmentation of narrative voices and disjointed juxtapositions create the effect of shattered mirrors reflecting shards of one another, through themes of brokenness, loneliness and self observation.
Intertextuality is blended with meta narrative in a central (ish) chapter about the Brontës themselves, ostensibly the wellspring of ‘Lost Child’ characters. Yet here too we sense that the dark and brooding backdrop of the moors is the binding underlying threat; both a symbol of the untameable id, the unconscious place of freedom or death of the controlling superego, and simultaneously the literal locus of the darkest deed which leads to the unravelling of Monica’s mind.
Heathcliff pounds across these same moors in the final chapters, dragging a terrified child “home”: is he the egocentric antagonist in the end? Or are we reading his chapter through Monica’s wildly unreliable narration?
I got the distinct impression, as the jagged plot progressed, that we are experiencing Monica’s reading of Wuthering Heights. The clues are there - she is a librarian and she loves reading; but the chaos of her addiction to alcohol and the loss of her son have driven her away from reality and into text.
The lost child is Monica who is also Heathcliff, dragging a son back home, tragically too late for any restoration of normality: “The boy looks into the man’s face, and again he asks him to please take him to his mother. Home.”
The issue of ‘race’ is peripheral, and dealt with lightly by Phillips. Racism is present and presented, but is not the point - guess what: an author of colour does not always have to bang on about ‘race’. Again, Phillips is way beyond thumping us over the head with the obvious and is more interested in fracturing form and narrative. This in itself could be read as a postcolonial deconstruction of “plot”, if you do want to go there; a critical seam which could be productively mined.
For me though, the intertextual difficulty and entanglement is the challenge which most successfully plunges us into Monica’s desolated psyche and surfaces the tragedy of her lost child.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 26, 2023
Es fällt mir schwer, die Handlung zusammen zu fassen. Zum einen spielt die Geschichte in der Vergangenheit und von einem Jungen, dessen Mutter verzweifelt versuchte, ihrem Leben als Prostituierte im Hafen zu entrinnen. In der Gegenwart ist es die Geschichte einer jungen Frau, die sich in den falschen Mann verliebt und mit ihren Söhnen ein Leben führen muss, das sie so nie gewollt hat. Und dann ist es auch die Geschichte von Schwestern, die aus ihrem isolierten Leben etwas Einmaliges schaffen.
Die drei Geschichten sind so unterschiedlich und fließen ineinander, so dass ich mich sehr lange gefragt habe, was der Autor mir sagen wollte. Ich habe zwar den Klappentext gelesen, aber ich konnte nur wenige Teile davon wirklich wiedererkennen. Die Geschichte, die in der Gegenwart spielt, von Monica und ihrem älteren Sohn ist noch die, der ich am meisten folgen konnte, weil sie viele interessante Ansätze bot. Sie alleine hätte mir ohne das Drumherum der anderen Handlungsstränge gereicht. Aber jedes Mal, wenn ich mich gerade in diesem Teil zurecht gefunden hatte, wurde ich wieder heraus gerissen und das, was mir gefallen hat, ist in den Hintergrund getreten.
Wenn ich mich jetzt an die Lektüre zurück erinnere, sehe ich nur einzelne Fragmente und kein zusammenhängendes Buch. Es passiert nicht oft, dass ich ein Buch so wenig verstehe wie dieses hier, weder von der Handlung noch von der Absicht des Autors.
Die drei Geschichten sind so unterschiedlich und fließen ineinander, so dass ich mich sehr lange gefragt habe, was der Autor mir sagen wollte. Ich habe zwar den Klappentext gelesen, aber ich konnte nur wenige Teile davon wirklich wiedererkennen. Die Geschichte, die in der Gegenwart spielt, von Monica und ihrem älteren Sohn ist noch die, der ich am meisten folgen konnte, weil sie viele interessante Ansätze bot. Sie alleine hätte mir ohne das Drumherum der anderen Handlungsstränge gereicht. Aber jedes Mal, wenn ich mich gerade in diesem Teil zurecht gefunden hatte, wurde ich wieder heraus gerissen und das, was mir gefallen hat, ist in den Hintergrund getreten.
Wenn ich mich jetzt an die Lektüre zurück erinnere, sehe ich nur einzelne Fragmente und kein zusammenhängendes Buch. Es passiert nicht oft, dass ich ein Buch so wenig verstehe wie dieses hier, weder von der Handlung noch von der Absicht des Autors.
January 20, 2019
It is not a retelling of Wuthering Heights about Heathcliff’s origins. Instead it is a very modern story of a mother initially marrying a man her parents don’t approve of and then her later struggle to look after her two sons and the consequences of that particularly on the elder son and his difficult life because of that. It is about children with difficult childhoods and about the difficulties of foster-care. I did enjoy it despite it being about a dysfunctional family with problems as it felt like quite a realistic story.
It makes passing reference to other lost children such as Branwell Bronte and at the end to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights but that is not the main part of the story. I suppose it is sort of a modern equivalent of Heathcliff’s story if he had been born in the 20th century-but it is obviously quite different due to the difference in when and where it is set.
It makes passing reference to other lost children such as Branwell Bronte and at the end to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights but that is not the main part of the story. I suppose it is sort of a modern equivalent of Heathcliff’s story if he had been born in the 20th century-but it is obviously quite different due to the difference in when and where it is set.
October 15, 2017
I think it's a shame that the book is marketed as a Bronte related book, because the beauty is in the fully drawn, so real it hurts story of Monica, her sons, and the bombastic, selfish men in her life. Set in 1950s- 1970s Britain, it captures so much of that grey, tower block, TV watching, grinding life. Like another reviewer, I was a bit frustrated by the silence of the women in this book, they were very much drawn as victims with very little agency or insight into their lives. But as I read more I realized that this was sort of the point... women and children being silenced, being presumed for, being used and mopping up men's insecurities and broken dreams. What an achievement of a novel.
March 9, 2021
I had to read this book for university and if not for this reason I would have given up on it a couple of chapters in. The book tries to blend narratives together but just comes off confused and a mess. The blurb of the book makes a big deal of the chapters on Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff, but these are two small chapters and add nothing to the main story - as a separate short story these would have been interesting, but as it stands, it just seems like the author added these to sell the rest of the book and nothing else.
Highly do not recommend.
Highly do not recommend.
May 15, 2021
The lure of this book was the fleshing out of Heathcliff's origins in Wuthering Heights, but the bulk of the story is a descent from pursuit of an Oxford degree to council housing single motherhood. The polyphonic design forces you into multiple "foreign"perspectives. A dark book, but what do you expect with Wuthering Heights as inspiration? He's very good at imitating Brontë, but in those sections I kept finding myself wanting to stay there. The darkness is so much easier to endure in 1800s than 1980s.
October 17, 2018
I found myself having to reread and reread because the important bits of the story were so carefully embedded (what happened to Monica, what happened to Tommy). I didn't like that; it spoiled the atmosphere. For me, the facts needed to be just a little less camouflaged. I am also hampered by not having read Wuthering Heights in so long that I couldn't make any coherent connection. But I'd like to try a different book of this writer; he still intrigues me.
May 16, 2019
I love a lean prose like the one Phillips uses here. This is a novel that riffs on Wuthering Heights, but the parallels are more symbolic than literal. It's narrated in third and first person. There are a couple of evocative Heathcliff passages, and a brief episode about the Bronte sisters themselves, but most of the book follows a young woman, Monica, through an unhappy marriage and a family life marred by tragedy. A lyrical meditation on loneliness, mistreatment, and abandonment.
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