Lost Autumn by Mary-Rose MacColl
Lost Autumn is not the first novel by Australian author Mary-Rose MacColl, but it is the first I have read – and enjoyed. She is certainly not in the league of Kate Grenville or Thomas Keneally, but she is a reasonable writer and her story was compelling. The cover blurbs of praise are by authors of the same sort of novel. The narrator of this novel tells us her publisher, who had strong views about book jackets, “It is, after all, the way we dress a naked book”. And, often how we choose which book we might like to read.
Under the cover of Lost Autumn we have an absorbing story. As the author says in her notes, this is a novel, it is fiction though the history is real. “We tell plausible whoppers, as Margaret Atwood has said, and that’s what I have done”.
The story begins with a baby left in the “foundling” wheel at St. John of God Church in London, England in the winter of 1921. The newspapers declare the following morning that the baby froze, and died, as the wheel had not been fully turned.
The story then moves to Australia, in 1981, and we meet Maddie Bright. It is the same day the engagement of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer is announced, and the same day that the inquest into the disappearance of a baby at Ayres Rock concludes that the baby was taken by a Dingo. Earlier that same week Maddie received a letter bringing news that has left her reeling, leaving her disturbed by both the past and the present.
Then again, we shift time, and are in London, England in 1997, the day of the death of Princess Diana. We meet journalist Victoria Byrd and her fiancé, Ben, a celebrated actor.
Then, back to 1920, again with Maddie, when she is seventeen years old and has been offered employment on the staff of Edward the Prince of Wales as he tours Australia.
Into all of this is woven parts of a novel, Winter Skies by M. A. Bright who wrote a best selling novel, Autumn Leaves, many years earlier.
You’d be forgiven if you think this is all too much, as I did after the first few chapters – but I was on a beach and too lazy to go back to the room for another book, so I persevered and before very long I was well into the story of all of these time periods, and characters, and read right through to the surprising end.
The picture painted of a young Prince Edward, the privilege, the selfishness, and the absolute despair that comes before the famous love affair with Wallis Simpson and the abdication, is very compelling. As are all of the other story lines that come together as the novel concludes.
Lost Autumn is a novel of innocence and cruelty, and one that made me wonder if every novel published from this day forward will have some content that deals with the exploitation of vulnerable young women by powerful men. It is also a story of taking what life hands you and making the best of it. As an elderly Maddie writes to her friend, Helen, “We can harden our hearts and miss the life that is ours, or we can soften and forgive and find something tender and real in the middle of ourselves”.
And, it is Helen’s and Maddie’s willingness to do so that will ultimately bring happiness and a richer life to many others.
Sounds better all the time – I may just have to look for another of Mary-Rose MacColl’s novels for the next time I have a day on a beach.