A New York Times Notable Book of the Year | An O Magazine Best Book of the YearThe New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy delivers another “luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered” (Dennis Lehane) novel—a poignant and probing psychological drama that follows the lives of three siblings in the wake of a violent crime.One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers … wake of a violent crime.
One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy’s life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed.
Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim’s brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back. Duncan, the youngest, who has seldom thought about being adopted, suddenly decides he wants to find his birth mother. Overshadowing all three is the awareness that something is amiss in their parents’ marriage. Over the course of the autumn, as each of the siblings confronts the complications and contradictions of their approaching adulthood, they find themselves at once drawn together and driven apart.
Written with the deceptive simplicity and power of a fable, The Boy in the Field showcases Margot Livesey’s unmatched ability to “tell her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness, and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses” (Lily King, author of Euphoria).
more
Like all of Margot Livesey’s work, her 11th book performs the impressive feat of stopping time so we can take a long, deep look into our puzzling present. It’s a book about being shocked into awareness of the world around us by a stunning event — the finding of a seemingly dead boy in a field. His legs are bloody; he’s been stabbed; but he’s breathing. It happens to three young people, Matthew, Zoe and Duncan. The victim struggles to piece together what has happened to him and who did it. The police have little to go on. The three siblings, one adopted, are lightning-struck by the event, as is the victim, Karel — but slowly he is recovering and starting to recall things. Regardless, the world has shifted and now, when the heroes look around, objects are closer, more in focus, and almost frozen in time: “Their house was in the middle of a terrace, the garden separated from those of their neighbors by brick walls. Beyond the lawn and the picnic table was a pergola covered with roses and honeysuckle, and beyond that a bed of rhododendrons, azaleas, smoke bushes, and two laburnum trees. The breeze that had sprung up earlier had grown stronger, and the trees and shrubs were swaying.” Here is an awakening to the ephemeral nature of life. In Duncan’s case, having always known he is adopted, it comes as an urgent need to find and meet his birth mother. For Zoe, it’s sex. She suddenly has to know what type of sexual being she is, and if sex is a good thing she needs to claim and make her own now, rather than waiting for it to find her. The year is 1999, so Y2K cometh, and that heightens the urgency to solve the big mysteries before it does. One mystery is Karel’s strange aversion to his own brother after the assault. Another is why their friend, Ant, is knocked off his scooter by a car that resembles the one from the scene of Karel’s attack. A theme here is the search for a way of seeing the world that will account for and bring everything into harmonious connection: “Then she was no longer in her body, no longer in the kitchen of her home, but in some other limitless space, where she could simultaneously appreciate the wrinkled apple in the fruit bowl, Lily’s toy bear, the tea towels hanging limply on the radiator, the silvery drops of water in the sink, the leafy ficus in the corner, her father’s absence.” The answer to who attacked the boy in the field both does and doesn’t matter — he is physically fine, he can’t recall the motive for the attack. He’s going on with life. But one crucial emotional detail has emerged: Karel thinks he said yes to a ride from his attacker because he seemed like a person most people say no to. It’s another of Karel’s slightly-off explanations for his actions. To better understand these events and her world, Zoe starts to dabble in logic and philosophy, especially Spinoza, but nothing quite adds up. There’s a large amount of infidelity and betrayal going around, and it has even reached inside her parents’ marriage. But, as readers, we start to suspect the real motive for the violence rocking the heroes’ worlds is something quite simple — our growing loneliness.