Strano Book

"I don't think I want to be anything. In fact, I hate thinking about the future at all."

"How do people become real? Does one just change as one gets older? Or did something definite happen to you?"

On the brink of the Great War when Clara Batchelor is almost 15, her grandfather dies and her mother, Isabel, becomes seriously ill with "female troubles" related to a dangerous, later-in-life pregnancy. Having had to finance Isabel's costly operation, Clara's father, Claude, can no longer afford to send the girl to Mount St. Hilary Convent School, where prominent Catholics send their daughters.

White not only tells the story of Clara, now back at home and attending the Protestant St. Mark's Girls' School, but she also spends a good deal of time on the two people who exert the greatest influence on the girl: her intense, conflicted, and emotionally disturbed father and her beautiful, narcissistic mother. Clara's new friendships with two Jewish girls'the studious Ruth Philips and the flirtatious, high-spirited Patsy Cohen (whose lively, busy and noisy home provides a significant contrast to Clara's dark and quiet one on Valetta Road)'are also explored.

Claude Batchelor converted to Catholicism when Clara was a child of seven. The ritual, the pomp, Claude's self-identified "feudal temperament", and a compulsion to rein in dark urges and a sinful nature were all factors in his decision. Claude's relationship with Clara, though not literally incestuous, is certainly emotionally so. His reaction to her budding sexuality is alarmingly inappropriate. Claude is demanding, controlling, and ambitious for his daughter. A boys' school classics teacher who would have preferred a son, Claude sees academic potential in his daughter and attempts to steer her towards Cambridge, at a time when few women attended institutions of higher education.

Clara is, however, "the lost traveller" of the title. She is rudderless after leaving the convent school. She belongs neither to the Catholic world nor the Protestant one, and though she claims she does not want to marry, she also rejects life as a bluestocking. She ends up taking a position as a governess to a precocious, spoiled ten-year-old boy, Charles Cressett, the only heir to a wealthy, old Catholic family in Worcestershire. Once installed in the Cressetts' Jacobean great house, Clara meets a young man from a nearby estate who is even odder and more adrift than she, Archie Hughes-Follett. "From babyhood," we are told, "he had attracted accidents and misfortunes of all kinds or [had] been the innocent cause of accidents to others." A soldier, now at home convalescing after a grenade explosion that killed another man, Archie, is another only son of a wealthy old Catholic family. Clara's meeting with this young man proves to be a fateful one, life-changing and tragic.

The Lost Traveller is an intense, absorbing, "old-fashioned" (in the best sense) read. It explores not only the adolescence of a young girl but the lives of her parents (and their influence on her). Though there are melodramatic elements, characterization is strong, the writing can be quite evocative, and White creates a convincing portrait of a girl who cannot find her way.