“It’s a very remarkable story.”
“Remarkable’s a well-chosen word. It doesn’t give you away.”
― James Hilton, Random Harvest
Some day when you’re bored, Google “best sellers of ____” (supplying your own year at least 25 years in the past). If you’re not a librarian or a student of popular literature — or even if you are — prepare to be surprised by how few of the book titles are even remotely familiar.
Popular literature, like all popular culture, is a bin filled with tinsel and the occasional treasure. Sometimes it’s hard to know, even in retrospect, why a book or album or movie instantly becomes a cultural touchstone, only to have it’s gilt wear thin over time. Just as puzzling is the work that, while popular, seems too inconsequential for enduring regard, yet remains in print for decades.
Such is the case of James Hilton’s Random Harvest.
The book tells the story of wealthy industrialist Charles Rainier, who develops amnesia as a symptom of shellshock while serving in World War I. Years later, as world war once again threatens Britain, Rainier embarks on a journey to discover the truth of those lost years.
Upon it’s 1941 release, Random Harvest became one of the best selling novels of the year. It was quickly made into a wildly popular MGM movie starring two of the studio’s most esteemed players, Greer Garson and Ronald Colman.
Hilton was no stranger to success, having enjoyed blockbuster sales and literary fame for two previous novels — Lost Horizon, which is famous if nothing else for introducing the concept of Shangri-La into popular consciousness, and Goodbye Mr. Chips, a novel about a schoolmaster who weathers the changes of the late Victorian period through the early 1930s that has been the source for numerous stage, screen and radio adaptations. Hilton counted none other than Sigmund Freud among his fans.
Random Harvest was judged a minor work even for Hilton. A contemporary Kirkus Review might have summed up the book’s critical fate best: “the story lacks the subtle characterization, the felicity of description that has made [Hilton’s] other books distinctive. Good for rentals.” In other words, check this one out from the library, but don’t bother buying it.
As a minor work by an author whose best years were behind him, Random Harvest seemed destined to be a nine day’s wonder. But Random Harvest is indeed a remarkable story.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously prophesied in 1914 on the eve of World War I. He may have foretold the coming of the Lost Generation, and of the post-war literature that recalled the war and it’s collateral cultural and political damage.
The famous novels of World War I are, in a word, realist: journalistic realism from Hemingway, intellectual realism from Ford, brutal yet bittersweet realism from Remarque. Random Harvest is the rare novel that treats the War to End All Wars with magical realism.
The book is a fairy tale/epic fable that plays out against the decidedly grim reality of Britain during the World War I era and the years leading up to World War II. From it’s improbable romance novel trope of a plot to it’s twist ending, Random Harvest is, like all fairy tales and fables, a meditation on good versus evil, on innocence versus experience, with experience by turns harrowing and magical. Hilton was the rare novelist to turn out the lamps of Europe, but to leave a candle in the window.
For critics accustomed to World War I through the grimy lens of trench warfare fiction, Random Harvest would indeed have seemed a slight effort. For readers whose memories of the war were a generation in the past, and for those who had no first-hand memories of the war at all, but were watching World War II unfold, Random Harvest must have seemed the very best kind of realism — that with a happy ending. For readers since, it’s Hilton’s sparkling prose and undeniable talent as a master storyteller that secures Random Harvest’s place on library and bookstore shelves.
Hilton himself may have captured the enduring magic of his novel best himself in this passage from Random Harvest — just substitute the title for “city”:
“There was a charm, a deathless charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, “The nights are drawing in,” as if it were a spell to invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter.”
Remember That One Book? 