The Quiet Power of The Boy in the Field

 

THE BOY IN THE FIELD (2020)

By Margot Livesay

Harper, 256 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

 

I dislike novels that try so hard to impress that only other authors and critics with affected highbrow airs are reeled in. One of the joys of Margot Livesay’s The Boy in the Field is that it’s gripping though nothing particularly earthshattering happens after the first few pages.

 

At its center are the three siblings of Hal and Betsy Lang: 18-year-old Matthew, 15-year-old Zoe, and 13-year-old Duncan. They live in the Cotswolds and one day the kids notice something as they are walking home. Duncan sees what appears to be a pair of red socks lying in a field by an oak tree, but they are blood-stained and attached to a young man, not a boy. They fear he might be dead, but each hears him mutter something. Was it cowrie? Cowslip? Coward?

 

The Langs duly report this, the victim is taken to a hospital, and Detective High Price informs them that Karel Lustig, a hospital worker, almost died but will be okay thanks to them. That’s heady stuff to digest, especially for Duncan who fantasizes possible crime scenarios only someone his age could conjure. The mystery thickens when Duncan learns that Karel had been beaten and stabbed by a driver who dumped him in the field.

 

Livesay deftly begins to unpeel layers of other things, including how traumas can reveal other things. After all, don’t we all have uncracked mysteries lurking within and about us? Hal is an ironsmith and Betsy a solicitor (lawyer to we Yanks) and theirs is a perfect marriage. Of course, we know that no marriage is “perfect,” so expect some revelations on that score.  

 

Spotting the boy in the field is also an unsettling trigger that subtly pushes each of the Lang children to forge their own identities. Matthew is about to enter university and needs to sort through his relationships with his best Benjamin, his social circle, and his various girlfriends. It’s all so overwhelming that at times he reverts to patterns more akin to the those of someone Duncan’s age than one on the verge of manhood. By contrast, Zoe grows increasingly distant from her family and wants to break out. She looks older than she is, is very smart, and holds her own in discussions with Rufus, an American Ph.D. philosophy student at Oxford. He’s a gentleman, though he finds Zoe more alluring than his girlfriend in Paris.

 

Duncan is affected most of all. He has trouble concentrating in school, though he’s a budding artist, and is too empathetic for his own good. It’s as if every detail he observed that day is indelibly etched in his mind. When he visits Karel in the hospital, Duncan grows even more obsessed and wants to “solve” the crime and enlists Karel’s jaded older brother Tomas in his amateur sleuthing. Duncan’s also adopted and becomes assertive in seeking his Turkish birth mother and, yes, he becomes color-conscious Yet for all the irons in various fires, Duncan is the one who makes friends the easiest.

 

The Boy in the Field is set in the year 2000 with a last chapter is a coda of how the Langs and the Lustigs are faring in 2008-09. Lest you think that Livesay has imposed on her characters the disruptive social transformations that were supposed to happen at midnight of January 1, 2020, let me assure that Livesay does not resort to anything that cheap. All that transpires is in keeping with their personalities and evolves organically.

 

How often does a writer impress you with a quiet and relatively action-free novel? For the kids, it’s a coming-of-age journey; for the adults one of dealing with good choices and bad ones. Far from penning a classic whodunit crime tale, Livesay offers penetrating overlapping character studies in which the actual resolution of the crime warrants more of a shrug than a gasp. It’s as if everyone was already on preordained paths illumined by the boy in the field. It reminded me of John Knowles’ classic A Separate Peace in that a single episode brings clarity to inner selves. This is a lovely and literary work but, lest it sound too weighty, know that a lovable dog also plays an important role.

 

Rob Weir