The Lost Girl is based on an intriguing futuristic idea — What if we could create copies of the people we love? Life is eminently unpredictable, but having an authentic copy of a loved one might take the sting away from sudden loss.
Sangu Mandanna explores the idea in all its varied shades with her young adult dystopian novel centered around the life of 16-year-old Amarra’s copy, or Eva, as she would rather be known.
Eva grows up in a sheltered cottage in England’s Windermere under the watchful eye of Mina Ma and her appointed guardians. She is painfully aware of being an Echo — a mere copy — whose life’s purpose is to imitate her original. She spends her time at lessons of an unusual sort: learning about Amarra’s life through the journal that Amarra grudgingly keeps. When tragedy strikes, Eva is called in to replace Amarra — she must go to India and settle into Amarra’s clothes, school, household, even boyfriend.
The novel fuses the matter-of-factness that comes with the “age of cloning” with the kind of hush and mystical aura we associate with the Dark Ages. The crack is visible here — modern-day London and Bengaluru seem technologically backward considering this is a “centuries old” practice. This is a futuristic premise then, set in the current age with medieval atmosphere thrown in for effect.
“The Loom”, where Echoes are “stitched” by “Weavers”, is reminiscent of the Tower of London, a dank, mysterious place, and the Weavers seem to be more like moody wizards than modern-day scientists. We know there is fire and dust and skin, but know little else about what goes into creating an Echo. Then there is the fact that there is nothing cut-and-dry about the relationship between Eva and Amarra. Eva often dreams of things that Amarra experiences. It is hinted by the Weavers that the soul of the original person may somehow resurface after death in the body of the Echo. The prospect of Amarra somehow taking over Eva’s life, even in death, hangs like a sword over Eva’s attempts to define her own identity.
So far so good; then come the “Rules” that accompany this transaction. Echoes are modern-day slaves, devoid of rights and belonging entirely to the Weavers, even to the extent of having their skin branded. They may be “unstitched” if they do not please the “Familiars” who ordered their making. They are also not allowed to form independent bonds of love and attraction, but must pretend to be the originals. No self-respecting teenager would stand for this, and Eva has a penchant for breaking the rules and getting into trouble. This leaves her exposed to the wrath of the Weavers on one end, and on the other to attacks by the “Hunters,” whose sworn mission it is to destroy, on principle, all Echoes.
Fast paced and smoothly plotted, The Lost Girl is a pleasure to read if you can digest the kind of morbid melancholy that accompanies much of young adult fiction today. It is established in this book that the world is a dark place where teenagers must navel-gaze about their identity and the meaning of life. And the battlelines are well drawn, placing Eva as the eternal outcast against Amarra’s world of friends and family.
As with any good tragedy, everyone here seems compelled to act as they do, and be who they are. A sense of loss is palpable throughout the novel and this angst is likely to strike a chord with teenagers. After all, what age group better understands what alienation means?
The Lost Girl may be based on a fantastic premise but it addresses issues that most post-adolescents must sort out as best as they can: a vanishing childhood, the exchange of innocence for experience, and the newness of navigating a world without shelter. Imagine teenage drama magnified to life-and-death situations and you can see why this would get a little heavy in the saturnine department.
Fortunately, the prose is light and practiced. Eva describes her guardian and friend Sean with typical emotive clarity. “He is tall and lean, with this shirt rolled up past his elbows and green eyes the exact colour of the marbles I had to play with when I was little… He has a scar below his left elbow. I wonder how he got it. I wonder why he cares more about an echo and her tattoo
than his human girlfriend’s birthday.”
Mandanna doffs her hat at Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, acknowledging the literary debt that comes with writing a novel about the repercussions of artificially creating life. Eva compares her life to that of the misunderstood, maligned, murderous abomination that was Frankenstein’s creature. The parallel ends there. The world of The Lost Girl, unlike Frankenstein, remains confined to the twilight of a hyper-real teenage existence where the highs and lows interchange rapidly. Frankenstein resonates somewhere deep in the unconscious, it flowers and it withers in an environment that is relatable. It is fiction that seems like fact. Eva’s story in The Lost Girl feels a lot more contained within the world of rules and obstacles that Mandanna conjures up, rather artfully.