Of fairy tales
Recommended Read|I’ve just finished reading ‘The Book of Lost Things’ by John Connolly. Probably better known for his crime novels, this may seem a peculiar departure for the writer but if so it is one he more than adequately explains in the last quarter of the book, which is dedicated to discussing many of the underlying themes and stories that have influenced him during his life, including their origins and a delightful reintroduction to and inclusion of some of these stories themselves. He incorporates these into the book expertly and chooses a style that is very reminiscent of the rhyme and rhythm of those fairy tales that for most of us were a first introduction to story-telling.
In so doing he initially confused me, not because I failed to understand his intention but because as a writer I couldn’t see the market from a publisher’s point of view. Clearly I enjoyed it and I could envision many adults doing likewise, yet initially I could see this being a book publishers often reject as seeing ‘no market for this sort of thing’. This isn’t a book for children, although it is a book that children of a certain age could read and probably gain from reading; however, I agree with the author that an adult will likely read this in a very different light to that of a child and this makes ‘The Book of Lost Things’ perhaps one of those novels that requires re-reading at a different stage in your life, possibly for the young adult and then as a mature one. I was pleasantly surprised to come across such a book because of the writing ‘rule’ that dictates if the lead in a book is a child then it is a children’s book.
This is most definitely a book for adults to enjoy, not solely because of the surprisingly bloodthirsty content. It’s amazing how many of us forget how dark, foreboding, and just plain bloodthirsty those old fairy tales that we grew up with and loved so well actually were. I didn’t need the book’s additional sojourn through the world of fairy tales to know that in some versions of Sleeping Beauty she awakens while giving birth, or the wicked queen in Snow White is made to wear red-hot iron ’slippers’ to dance in until she dies, just as I know that in Cinderella birds fly down to pluck out her stepsisters’ eyes. Fairy tales have always held great interest for me and have influenced my work. indeed, my erotic romance ‘Rose Light’ is a retelling of ‘Cinderella’, abate one where I had to heighten sexual content to satisfy the publisher but one which I intend to one day restore to its original form for another market. So nothing about the content of Connolly’s book surprised me. I was amazed to find a book published that kept to the traditions of these stories and celebrating their content, of change, of choice, of triumphant, abate in an often gruesome way.
Ultimately the strongest depth and substance to the book is grief and loss and how it changes us, becomes a part of who we are and, like stories, influences our lives; yet overall because this is a ‘fairy tale’, it resonates in the way all good stories should.
