Lost Girl

*MINOR SPOILERS IN REVIEW*

NOTE TO SELF: On a sunny Sunday afternoon when your seven year old is playing in the garden and is pestering to play 'out front' DO NOT, and, I really mean DO NOT start to read a story about a four year old girl abducted from her garden right under the noses of her parents!!!

Honestly, I don't think I could have picked a worse time or circumstance to read this book. The subject matter and themes hit and hit really hard in a book that is quite grim and hard to get through.

'Lost Girl' is set in the South West of England the near(ish) future of 2053. The world around us feels familiar but civilization is clearly on the brink of collapse. Food is scarce, the ice caps have melted, temperatures are rising, humans are on the move in their millions to find somewhere safe to live. Nations threaten nuclear war with each other, deadly pandemics wipe out huge swathes of the global population. The disparity between rich and poor is growing and many people's lives are wretched. What is left of the government and public sector has effectively been replaced by criminal syndicates in the thrall of an occult death cult.

All of this isn't immediately apparent as a man is sat on his laptop messaging a colleague / potential lover whilst his wife in the garden asks him, 'to keep an eye on' their daughter whilst she pops inside. In a matter of seconds their four year old has been snatched and every parent's worst nightmare has come true....

The plot fast forwards a couple of years and the father (only known as 'the father' in the novel) has been recruited by a shadowy handler, perhaps connected to the police or a right wing faction in society with one job - to hunt down paedophiles and extract information from them, ostensibly to extract information to lead him to his daughter's kidnappers but also to provide intelligence to his handlers.

These early chapters are pretty grim to read but set the novel off to a blistering pace as the 'ordinary middle class man' quickly learns to be a ruthless torturer...and killer. As distasteful as the subject matter is, these early chapters were brilliant in the sense that you really get the sense of someone quite ordinary doing increasingly dangerous actions and gradually losing his own sense of humanity (which does become a theme) as he adjusts to the greater depth he is getting in.

Sadly for me, once we have got through these early chapters of engaging (and torturing) paedophiles it pretty much becomes a little bit more of the same, just with the stakes higher as he learns more about what has happened and rather than being exciting I just felt the book became a bit monotonous.

This is the first book I have not enjoyed of Adam Nevill's and for the first time I really noticed the incidence of long passages that go absolutely nowhere with just tons of rambling nonsense - mostly about the death cult / crime syndicate. I kind of get what he was trying to do but I could never really take them seriously as a plot hook. It just all kind of felt silly. In this book the introduction of a supernatural element really didn't work for me.

I don't think one can get away from the fact that this is a grim book. Human trafficking, child sexual exploitation and paedophilia are constant themes in the book. The subject matter is challenging and it's not an easy read. What really turned me off the book was when I got in my head that the book was filled with quite unpleasant racist undertones. Now I don't think for one second that Nevill is a racist, rather that he has presented a vision of the near future and it is really, really, really fucking horrible. Other nations doing shitty things to each other are referred to as 'the Chinese' or 'the Indian', basically tarring all the people with the actions of the government. The refugees fleeing to Britain are othered, and whilst the exploitation of them is explicit we rarely see any of their humanity. Even most of the bastards in the novel have an ethnic or national background other than British which seems to be highlighted. The 'nationalists' are only ever mentioned off-screen and I couldn't get out of my head that there is a sense of, 'yeah they are fascists but they're not all bad'. I guess it's one of those things that once I'd noticed I couldn't stop noticing.

One of the most challenging things to read in the novel, and to be honest Nevill deserves a lot of props for this despite the context is that a significant element towards the end of the novel is, Nevill successfully using SARS COVID-11 as a plot device originating in China and passed on through wet markets and people eating bats and rats passed on by people breathing on each other. A pandemic that wipes out billions, where only the rich have a vaccine. Obviously it isn't on Nevill to anticipate something similar happening just a few years later but gosh it was grim reading in the context of summer 2021.

As difficult as the book is, the world building is spot on. Most of it is plausible (and I was pleasantly surprised to see Complexity / Systems Thinker James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis was an influence on the book). I guess the horror doesn't come from the death cult or the theft of a little girl but more the fact that everything shit in the book is right in front of our face and is preventable - but we kind of know it's inevitable if we don't change. In 2021 I can't see it - and that terrifies me.

By the time we get to 'well exactly what happened to his little girl' whilst the details are only revealed quite late I had kind of guessed 'it would be something like that'.

So the pluses - there is a lot of world building, and the book is bound to push buttons for pretty much every reader.

The negatives - well, some of the elements are a real turn off and turn something gritty into something unpleasant but I think that goes with the territory. I think my biggest criticism is that much of the book just drags on and on through pages of 'look how bad humans are' or 'crazy shaman explaining his mad cult'.

Ultimately, the book is about the degeneration of mankind, both as individuals, communities and as a species. An impactful effort, but not necessarily a well crafted novel.