How Does Lost Lambs End And Why Does It Matter?

I get delightfully queasy thinking about how ‘Lost Lambs’ ends. Instead of tying up all the loose ends in a neat bow, the book finishes on a strange and somewhat moving note. Harper’s rather daft suspicions about the shipping container turn out to be rather more serious than he knows, and become involved with the rather mysterious (and, rumor has it, somewhat sinister) billionaire Paul Alabaster. As the story about to unfold becomes more and more conspiratorial, it also reveals more and more about the small town and its power structures. And then, once the action has reached its peak and we’ve had our adrenaline fix, the book pulls back from all that and goes for something rather sweet and sentimental. It rewards the characters’ vulnerability, rather than condemning them for it. This is a satire that, rather than knocking the characters and abandoning them to get on with it, is able to show that, in the end, skepticism and repair are not mutually exclusive. For people who like novels that are often funny, are very sharp, and then end up being rather sweet and human, this is a great ending.

For all the chaos that ensues for the Flynn family in Wildly’s ‘Lost Lambs’, the novel ultimately finds a cozy ending. The grounds for their disintegration from family to almost unrelated individuals— Harpers’s tracing of a mysterious shipping container through obsessive and exhausting research— led the family into the lair of Paul Alabaster, billionaire shipping magnate. It is his dark brooding presence in the small town that interacts with Flynn family’s down at heel lives that forms the core of the external events driving the novel towards its climax as mysterious containers spark a number of very real conspiracy fears to turn up stones of secrets and divide family members against each other. Interestingly, as a number of reviewers comment, the ending to ‘Lost Lambs’ comes in on a tenderness that somewhat surprises, but in all respects is wonderful. All the greatly tense scenes that led to this moment have a single function: in order to humanize Wildly’s understandably, ferociously satirical portayal of the Family, the home and above all corporate surveillance of the largest of multi-nationals ( huge shipping container magnates) to reveal that Wildly has every reason to reach a closing comment of the absolute highest moral standards concerning the only human forces that resist it: family above all. All this by way of a furthermore pretty high-end resolution to satirize so ferociously: the object of Wildly’s sketching out here is after all no clearer than before but is throughout perfectly dispatched. What this means for me personally, is a rare novel today. Used here to greatest effect, is the evoking of corporate surveillance of the largest multi-national kind, a set of rumors and conspiracy theories in a small town and an equally flawed yet lovable set of family members, with comedy and realistic human feeling, which are all blended to great and consistently high effect throughout its three hundred or so pages. Typically the threats posed by such large organizations and with them their hidden machinations have to be authentically researched to be plausibly ‘drawn’; what Humanbasename reads, however, is that the Wildly’s Flynn family above all is encountered by those conspiratorial ‘structures’ here and find their ground in all the blurred lines of human connection with these as with all other hostile systems of great reach, as with all equally flawed but above all human other people too. Therefore a large part of Wildly’s accomplishment, which will be returns to below, rests exactly here: the switch in his overall project—of radical satire—that enshrines human, Family above all connection as (as is here consistently proven to be so) as the most viable and powerful of all resistances to commercial, here multi-national machination, to a homogenous, here importingly also bitter-and-sarcastic “resistance” as in Aguirre (or even Ferris Bueller for that matter) as also is here.

‘Lost Lambs’ brings the Fly stack to life and pulls them into a real world crisis in the shipping container. The novel rises to the occasion and continues to read in a satirical manner right to the end. After the satisfying crisis with Paul Alabaster the novel retreats from pure cynicism to offer a sentimental but fitting readend to the central relationships of the novel. Critics and readers alike have commented on the unusual shift in tone to offer a study of systems but also of flawed human beings attempting to have the best of intentions and behave honorably in the worst of circumstances. This study is what has stuck with me.