Twice Lost

All but forgotten since its initial publication in 1960, Paul’s curious novel seems almost perversely designed to confound expectations. The mysterious and haunting disappearance of seven-year-old Vivian Lambert is rendered still more baffling by her possible reappearance several years later, opening old wounds and inflicting new ones. Especially poignant is the moral struggle and apparent gaslighting of Christine Gray, who was perhaps the last person to see the girl alive and the first to witness her seeming resurrection. Alternating the knotty revelations of a whodunnit with subjective dives into the uncanny spell of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and vivid depictions of the pastoral English countryside, Paul’s narrative leads readers down the garden path only to send them backtracking through a hedge maze of competing interpretations, under the gradually darkening sky of a fallen Eden.