Review of THE BOY IN THE FIELD by Margot Livesey

 3 Stars

This book left me cold.

On their way home from school in September, 1999, the three Lang siblings (Matthew, 18; Zoe, 16; and Duncan, 13) find a boy in a field.  He was stabbed.  The boy, Karel Lustig, survives but their finding him changes the lives of the rescuers.  Matthew wants to find the person who harmed Karel, and besides speaking with the official police investigator, begins a secret investigation.  Zoe becomes aware of how men are attracted to her and starts exploring her sexuality.  Duncan starts searching for his birth mother.

The story is told through the alternating perspectives of the three teenagers.  The personality of each is developed:  Matthew is responsible and thoughtful; Zoe is headstrong and confident; and Duncan is observant and sensitive.  The problem is that the three are all too good to be true.  They are close-knit, loving, thoughtful, generous, and supportive.  They also are too mature for their ages, often making comments that display a wisdom beyond their years.  At one point, Duncan talks about finding his birth mother:  “’This is about finding one particular person with whom I have a particular relationship.  I didn’t want to have this idea.  It hunted me down.’”  A 13-year-old would not use a dangling preposition and would know the proper use of the relative pronoun?  A fund-raiser that would probably have most teenagers cringing has these three participating.  At times it feels like the three stepped out of an episode of Leave it to Beaver.

The title of the book suggests that the boy found in the field will be the focus of the book.  He isn’t.  In fact, there is often little connection back to the crime.  It is true that they all suffer a loss of innocence as a result of finding Karel and perhaps confront adulthood a little sooner.  But it seems a stretch to tie much of their behaviour back to discovering the boy.  After the event, Duncan imagines he sees his birth mother in the shadows of the garden and dreams about her, so he sets off to find her.  The connection between finding Karl and Duncan’s searching for his biological mother is tenuous at best.  A 16-year-old girl would be expected to be intrigued about sex, so why would her role in finding Karel be pivotal?  It is Matthew’s development that seems to be most directly tied to what happened:  he wants to understand how someone could have hurt Karel so he wrestles “with the problem of evil” and solving “the ultimate locked room [mystery that] is another person’s brain.”

The character that most interested me is Karel whom a co-worker describes as an unusual person:  “’People tend to confide in him.  And he’s very truthful.  Both make him vulnerable.’”  His fate at the end is not a surprise, but I would have loved to have more of his story.  His relationship with his brother Tomas could be more completely developed.  I also kept thinking that Karel and Duncan, despite their age difference, could have been friends.

Just as I didn’t see connections in the novel, I didn’t connect with it.  It has received many rave reviews, so perhaps it’s just me.