Steven Carroll’s The Lost Life follows the successful Miles Franklin Award-winning The Time We Have Taken. In this new novel Carroll leaves behind the familiar setting of
Catherine and Daniel are young lovers from a town north of
While in the gardens, the lovers witness a very private ‘ceremony’ between Miss Emily Hale, an American woman whose rented cottage Catherine has been hired to clean and the famous poet T.S. Eliot. The ceremony ends with the burial of a metal box in the flowerbed. The older lovers depart leaving Catherine and Daniel hidden in the bushes wondering at the import of what they have witnessed. Before Catherine can stop him, Daniel, known in the village for his mischievous pranks, leaps out of the bushes and digs up the metal tin. He does so for ‘a lark’ and as a sort of gift to Catherine. She is unimpressed despite her curiosity and orders him to return it to the flowerbed. However Daniel fails to do so before Miss Hale and Eliot return to find the ground disturbed and the box missing. Eliot immediately suspects his estranged wife of having a hand in the disappearance of the box (she is unwilling to admit the failure of her marriage and has taken to stalking him). The poet is furious and inconsolable and the incident leads him to depart from the village days later.
Read the rest of Simon's review here.
