This beautiful Australian novel is about choices and the inevitability of loss. The protagonist, Stella, finds herself in the past and tries to change her daughter’s fate, but can she? Is it possible to save people from exercising their own free will?
I’m not usually a fan of novels involving time travel but here it’s dealt with in such a matter-of-fact way, it becomes entirely credible. It helps that Stella doesn’t deliberately travel back in time; she just gets off a bus and wonders where the hell the jacaranda blossoms she saw this morning have gone. Then she meets her former self in the street and carries on from there.
Time travelling Stella has endured one major tragedy; the loss of her daughter, Claire, to a drug overdose when Claire was sixteen. Stella has always felt that Abby, one of Claire’s friends, was largely responsible for her daughter’s drug taking and death. When Stella finds herself back in 1997, four years before Claire dies, she sets about trying to eliminate the influence of Abby in Claire’s life. As time goes by she contemplates increasingly ruthless methods. But it seems every move Stella makes has an effect on the future, and her memories of the past sway and alter in response to her actions. It’s a fascinating process and makes for compulsive reading, seeing whether Stella can save her daughter and what else she’s going to mess up along the way.
Another of the lost girls in Stella’s life is her aunt, Linda. Linda disappeared from her small home town when she was a teenager, well before Stella was born. To infiltrate her way into Stella’s family, time travelling Stella pretends to be the missing Linda – a questionable ethical choice, but one that gets her inside her old family life where she needs to be to begin influencing the future.
Stella’s mother Anne, a sister to the missing Linda, isn’t fooled for a second. I particularly love the relationship and conversations Stella has with her mother. Anne eventually comes to know the truth about Stella’s time travel but wisely refrains from asking Stella too many questions about the future. After all, would you want to know when and how you end up dying? And if you did, could you do anything about it? Would you?
The Lost Girls is written with such intelligence and compassion; it reminds me very much of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. Both novels utilise time travel as a tool for the exploration of the human condition and both have a distinct understanding of what is, in the end, important in a life. Stella doesn’t spend her time in the past trying to influence world events or giving her younger self stock market tips. Instead she revels in seeing her children and husband again, as they were, and tries to use a light touch when steering them away from their worst choices. But so many of her acts have unintended consequences.
The Lost Girls ultimately leaves you with a sense of sadness at the inevitability of loss in every life, but it is such a beautiful read you can sit with the sadness for a while, and not mind it.
