Never what it seems: #Begorrathon24

© C A Lovegrove

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods.
One More Chapter, 2024 (2023).

‘The thing about books,’ [Martha] said, ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.’ — Epilogue.

Hovering between magic realism and fantasy, romance and historical fiction, The Lost Bookshop slyly plays with the reader’s expectations of a straightforward narrative. How can a bookshop be lost? Who are Opaline, Martha and Henry, and how – and more to the point, why – are their lives fated to intersect?

A twisting intertwining plotline, like the roots and branches of a tree, takes in townhouses in Dublin and London, a famous Paris bookshop, an institution in Connacht, a dilapidated building in Italy and the First World War battlefields of Northern Europe, and involves births, deaths, liaisons, failed marriages and family secrets. We fairly accurately guess at some of the connections but others will elude our suspicions till the very end.

However, as Opaline tells us in Chapter 1, ‘A book is never what it seems,’ alerting us to the need to peer behind and beyond the words on the page; her words are unconsciously echoed by a tipsy Henry a few chapters later when he bombastically declares, ‘A book is so much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents.’ What are we expected to glean from these portentous pronouncements?

Sylva Beach outside Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Of course a book about a bookshop is full of references to books. Titles of children’s books, classics, contemporary novels, even illuminated manuscripts, they all get name-checked. But we are invited to consider two works in particular – the synopsis of the putative second novel by Emily Brontë, and a children’s novel called A Place Called Lost – for these will furnish the crucial mechanisms that drive the plot … as also will text not written on pages but inked and sewn.

Yet books are nothing without authors, readers, and even wheeler- dealers; and so the lives of booklovers Opaline, Martha and Henry are intimately bound up not just with each other but with their own complex family histories and relationships with associates: stories of abuse, addictions, trauma, betrayal, incarceration, mutism, obsession, misogyny and PTSD, but also trust, friendship, and love.

It’s impossible to go into further details without giving away unforgivable spoilers so it’s probably best just to reveal my personal reactions. Writing as Evie Woods the author Evie Gaughan tells an engaging but also tantalising story, one moreover that I feel is built on essential and sometimes distressing truths, as when Opaline muses ‘that men in particular seem to need a war to find meaning in what they already have.’ If at times I found it hard to suspend disbelief in how certain characters chose to act or react, that didn’t stop me wanting to read on.

© C A Lovegrove.

For all the realism portrayed in terms of social conditions prevalent in Britain and Ireland in the last century and through the antediluvian attitudes of many men towards women, the truly fantastical uncompromisingly threads its way through the narrative. You may be the kind of reader who’s accepting of such magic or the sort for whom the supernatural, fate and all the rest is anathema, but there’s no escaping this aspect; after all its presence is implicit in the very title of the book! It does mean though that it’s rarely possible to predict what situation will arise when you turn the page.

I’ll leave you with a pronouncement from the enigmatic Madame Bowden, Martha’s employer and landlady, which warns against complacent acceptance of the humdrum in life and the solace of the ordinary.

‘… if you’re not scared, then you’re not living.’ — Eileen Bowden.

For the protagonists in this novel there are indeed scares aplenty; does this however mean they’ll survive all that’s thrown at them?

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#ReadingIrelandMonth2024 @ 746books.com

The second title I’ve read for Cathy at 746books.com’s #Begorrathon24