Lorien Lost - Hardcover

King, Michael

3.35

31 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312143494 ISBN 13: 9780312143497

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

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The year is 1871. Timid Milton Radcliffe is an art collector with a curious gift: He can "step inside" a painting and enter the artist's mind. In this manner he visits the lovely Lorien, depicted in pastoral works by her artist-husband, Jonathan Larking. Milton is devastated when a gallery fire on his London estate destroys the only painting of her that he owns.
Discovering Larking's private journal, Milton learns that a life-size sculpture of Lorien exists in the couple's old summer retreat, somewhere in the Devonshire landscape already familiar to him through the destroyed painting. To find the statue, Milton must puzzle out the exact location of real-life "Larking Land" while circumventing deliciously Dickensian unscrupulous contemporaries as well as fantastical medieval apparitions rooted in his boyhood fears of falling off the world.
He is joined in this expedition by Heather, described in Larking's diary as a little girl. Now grown to a beautiful young opera singer whose voice has mysteriously disappeared, Heather cannot lead Milton to "Larking Land" until she confronts and defeats malevolent forces emanating from the labyrinthine passages of a dilapidated theater. Milton and Heather's journey becomes a magical quest through the luminous and darker sides of the Victorian imagination.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A dreamy first novel, owing more than a little to Lewis Carroll, that's set in a wholly imaginary Victorian England. Rather than a looking-glass, King's meek hero, Milton Radcliffe, plunges within paintings to escape the real world. He is particularly fond of those painted by the mysterious Jonathan Larking, and even falls in love with Larking's evocation of his wife, Lorien. Milton and Lorien while away the hours in Larking Land, an enchanted and timeless place of oat fields and flowering meadows, pipe-smoking, loquacious farm animals, and, less happily, foul dragons. Milton loves the supernal Lorien and Larking Land so much he can hardly bear to return to reality, but then the wing of his mansion where his paintings are housed burns. Woebegone Milton leaves the mansion gates, wanders for the first time ever down the London streets and happens upon Larking's lost journals in an obscure bookshop. He decides to mount an expedition to remote (in this universe) Devonshire, where Larking lived with the real-world Lorien and did much of his painting. Rivals emerge: the unscrupulous curator of a wax museum, who wants to sculpt Milton, trapping him in reality; and another collector, a ruthless sort who pushes horses and men beyond endurance, all the while brandishing a cane like some fugitive from a gothic tale. Milton never finds Lorien, but in the real world he's joined by Heather, and slowly, enveloping the story like rising waters, Larking Land takes over as the real world drops away. It's a skewed, uneasily pleasant landscape that fades, dreamlike, into nothingness. There are even signs announcing ``World's End.'' Quirkily charming in a literary way, though many readers will be put off by Milton's lack of substance--or that of any other of King's characters. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Set in London of 1871, this beguiling if uneven debut, a parable on the dangers and powers of the artistic imagination, fuses fantasy and romance in a recreation of the style and spirit of Victorian adventure novels. Eccentric recluse Milton Radcliffe, an art collector gifted with the ability to step inside the world of his paintings, becomes obsessed with a portrait of Lorien, wife and model of the famous but publicity-shy artist Jonathan Larking. After a fire destroys his painting of Lorien, Milton launches an expedition to locate Larking's cottage hideaway in Devonshire, where a life-sized statue of Lorien is stashed away. In Milton's journey through Larking Land-both a protean realm of the imagination and a challenging concrete reality-the recluse-turned-adventurer is accompanied by Heather Feur-De-Lys, an opera soprano who knew Lorien as a little girl. Thulemander, a 14th-century Wessex cartographer, periodically materializes to taunt Milton, who encounters dragons, other bizarre creatures and apparitions on a quest that extends from Madam Tussaud's waxworks to a secret tunnel where he, Heather and a police inspector discover an enormous, serenely smiling head, the Golden Child. Although King, a California graphics designer, resorts to half-baked symbolism, dead-end subplots and two-dimensional characters, his yarn-charmingly illustrated with 50 Victorian engravings and ornamental designs-captivates with its imaginative vision and lyrical prose.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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