The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips - book review: Wuthering lows

It’s all buttoned-up Britishness and wasting away in bedsits

The Brontë sisters wrote fiction with an exceptionally vibrant afterlife: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and their characters still loom large, thanks to endless adaptations from prestige films to pop songs, and umpteen fictional rewrites, updatings, prequels and sequels.

The Lost Child seems to be the latest addition; a modern narrative is bookended by a sort of Heathcliff origins story, and interrupted by one chapter with a dying Emily Brontë. But in truth, this novel will offer very little succour for bonnet-lovers.

The bulk of The Lost Child takes place in Leeds and London between the 1950s and 1980s. Like Wuthering Heights, it follows several generations of a troubled family. But if Wuthering Heights is memorable for its characters’ wild, anguished love and jealousy, the characters of Caryl Phillips’s book are repressed and depressed; they may be just as incapable of reconciliation, but it’s all buttoned-up Britishness and wasting away in bedsits. Phillips writes with acute insight into the smallness of lives lived on the breadline in a highly stratified society – but, oh, it makes for a dour read.

Monica, an “oddly intense northern girl”, becomes estranged from her family after marrying an Afro-Caribbean PhD student. They have two children, but separate. Monica drifts back to Leeds, and eventually dates a man who will have a sinister impact on her family and her mental health.

Phillips pulls the reader slowly down a spiral of misfortune, but The Lost Child is never flashy or manipulative in its misery – tragic events are alluded to elliptically, or in passing. There are no histrionics between husbands and wives, parents and children – just heart-breaking silence, uncrossable distance. Phillips’s writing is also subtle on the matter of race: the prejudice Monica faces in marrying a black man, the bullying that her sons receive for being mixed race, is only glancingly mentioned – but it’s there all right.

And if we are attuned to it, it’s because of Phillips’s bookending: he takes the reference to Heathcliff as “dark-skinned” and runs with it, casting him as the son of Mr Earnshaw and a Congolese former slave. But while one can strain to find parallels between the stories, the two strands do not really enhance each other. Wuthering Heights may be overblown in its Gothic drama, but The Lost Child can be underwhelming, swirling down the plughole of its kitchen-sink realism.

Oneworld £14.99