Random Harvest

"… he isn't happy now – that I do know – there's always a look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn't find it." (pg. 26)

As the creator of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon, James Hilton should be a more well-known writer; his name, by rights, part of our collective cultural memory even if he's no longer widely read. But, with the exception of that magnificent Lost Horizon and the short, sentimental Goodbye Mr Chips, none of his books are in print. To get Random Harvest, I had to buy a charming, old-fashioned hardback on eBay, a yellowed 1942 reprint with a dust jacket that proclaimed the role of the BBC as the 'voice of freedom' broadcasting to 'the occupied countries of Europe'.

Reading Random Harvest, a show more bestseller on its release in 1941 and considered the 'best of the rest', you can see why Hilton's reputation rests on just two books. Hilton, who died aged 54, was perhaps too prolific – and too popular – for his own good. However engagingly written – and Random Harvest is very charming – you get a sense of a writer writing middlebrow entertainments when he had the talent to write something more.

Whilst never a pot-boiler, and never gushingly sentimental, it is hard to peg just what Random Harvest is and why it never transcends itself in the way that Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr Chips could. The book follows a successful but dissatisfied upper-class businessman who served in World War One and is now, as the world gears up for its sequel against Hitler, trying to remember what happened during a two-year period immediately following the war, where he lost his memory and, presumably, led another life.

It is a mystery book that never seems to care about its mystery; a love story that never commits to the centrality of its romance; a homespun, middlebrow Dickensian sketch that spends a lot of time talking about share dividends and board meetings. It seems to want to both bask in its created warmth – and there's always warmth in a Hilton story – and yet aspire to something more. The businessman's plight works as an overarching metaphor for a "brief unmemoried idyll" (pg. 321) between two wars, but this melancholy acceptance of impending cataclysm was done to much better effect in Lost Horizon and Mr Chips. Neither of the businessman's two lives are especially interesting – indeed, they seem drearily alien to a modern reader. A sentimental, improbable ending doesn't convince – although some readers will like it – and brings Random Harvest back down into the ranks of middle fiction.

None of this is to say the book doesn't work. It does – only it's hard to see the purpose towards which it is actually working. Plot, character, theme, setting and dialogue are all ably done without ever seeming to lift the novel off the ground. This is a writer who has a learned idiosyncrasy that brings texture and idea to his books, yet in Random Harvest it seems to be all things and none. Part of Hilton's appeal is that his characters are often reaching for something they cannot express and cannot grasp; it does not work quite so well when the book itself is doing the same. show less

“You saved the family inheritance, you rescued the money of hundreds of outsiders, and you kept intact the jobs of a whole army of workpeople. You did, in fact, everything you set out to do.” “There’s only one thing more important,” he [Ranier] answered, “and that is, after you’ve done what you set out to do, to feel that it’s been worth doing.”

Set in England, from immediately after the Great War to just prior to WWII. In 1937, graduate student Harrison meets Charles Rainier on a train. They discuss the approaching war and Ranier’s service in the last. Ranier confides in Harrison about his war experiences that resulted in a stay in a mental hospital. At the time of their meeting, Rainier is a successful businessman show more and a Member of Parliament. Eventually, Harrison works for Ranier as his secretary.

Harrison starts out as narrator, then the story shifts to third person to tell Ranier’s backstory – how he lost his memory, eventually found his family again, and ended up rescuing the family’s business from bankruptcy. It is a story of loss, psychological trauma, and change.

Ranier feels his life is incomplete in some vague way. He is going through the motions, but feels no commitment, no passion. The forward momentum of the story is maintained by curiosity as to what happened to Ranier during the years he cannot remember. I got the impression that Ranier may represent what was happening in England at the time.

“The war was over … but now what? The dead were still dead; no miracle of human signature could restore limbs and sight and sanity; the grinding hardships of those four years could not be wiped out by a headline. Emotions were numb, were to remain half-numbed for a decade, and relief that might have eased them could come no nearer than a fret to the nerves.”

This book was published in 1941, so it is a slice of time from the perspective of someone who lived it. Hilton is a wonderful writer. His characters are vividly drawn, even the minor characters such as the traveling troupe of actors and the eccentric country pastor. It is beautifully crafted, with a number of storylines converging at the end in a satisfying and unexpected way. show less

Even if life seems like a random harvest between surprising positive and negative meaningless events, love can always find a way to have a life changing purpose. This is a very good novel that examined the peace culture in post World War I England.

Charles, a war veteran severely wounded in the trenches tried to find some sense in his life filled with shell shocked sporadic memory. Like James hilton's earlier novel, “Lost Horizon,” this novel is remarkably prescient considering today's seemingly chaotic peace between the wars.

The precarious peace that was achieved after World War 1 seemed to leave British citizens desperately yearning for return to a way of life that was more an illusion than a reality. Politics had became show more increasingly aggressive in European countries. One country after another was attempting to assert its former dominance whether large or small.

People seemed to wander here and there looking for some sort of purpose in the culture of Peace. Celebrations of peace were slowly but surely evaporating. The common reaction was to wait and see what happens and try to maintain a peace at all costs.
There was a rise of nations that had not learned anything from the horrors of the First World War. These European nations only needed a single world tyrant to raise the specter of aggression.
Just as we allowed the Vietnam War and our desert wars to spawn the current batch of sociopaths in government, European citizens relied on well-meaning optimists obeying the laws of a rational culture to magically return the world to peace and prosperity.
In Random Harvest Charles the victim of major injuries in the trenches of war wanders around Europe looking for the keys to his vague memory of a peaceful existence.
Sometimes peace on earth is measured in money and property, but these do not phase Charles. He is looking for something in his lost memory that perhaps was worth the risk of dying for in the past and living for in the present. He does not know that it will be a random meeting, a chance encounter with the love of his life that will be the treasure of the random harvest of his life. show less

Random Harvest opens in 1937 with the first narrator, a Cambridge graduate student named Harrison, encountering an older man named Charles Rainier on a train. They discuss the impending war and a shared interest in psychology, as well as a story about Rainier's service in the Great War and his two years of amnesia. One thing leads to another and after Harrison finishes his degree he takes a job as Rainier's secretary.

They become somewhat close, and eventually Charles tells Harrison his story. He was the younger son of an autocratic father who ran a prominent company. He eventually joined the army to fight the Germans, and became severely injured. He remembered nothing from the time of his injury until waking on a bench in the Liverpool show more rain a year or two after the armistice. Then he returned home to find his father dying. Charles is pressured into taking over the firm leading to an apparently loveless marriage to an efficient secretary who, as his wife, works hard to make him a social and political leader. He's filled with a growing sense of loss, and of having missed a chance to do what he really should have with his life.

Random Harvest is a really fascinating story. The narrative moved along somewhat slowly during the first part but once Charles begins his story it was hard to put down. The finale was very surprising but one I never saw coming while reading the book. The characters are developed fully and compassionately over time, revealing through the progression of events and interactions, the true sense of a public man struggling with his private demons. James Hilton was a master story teller, and Random Harvest displays his talents at their height. show less

James Hilton deals in sentimentality and nostalgia, all presented through a middlebrow medium. That sounds harsh. And so it was meant when Hilton began his career in the interwar years, especially among the modernist highbrow set. But during the 1950s, middlebrow literature gained a slight degree of respectability--although it was still used by aspiring highbrows to harpoon great literary whales represented by such institutions as the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Modern Library. The sense of ennui after World War II sent a generation on a search for meaning. And books such as Random Harvest and Hilton's other two earlier major works, Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr. Chips fit the bill perfectly, even if they had already gained widespread show more popularity during their initial publication in the 1930s and early 1940s and in subsequent film versions. For the post World War II 1950s, material comfort and well being were not enough. Albeit set against the backdrop of possible annihilation through atomic war, life needed a certain frisson. And so a flurry of successful middlebrow works in literature addressed to this concern began to flourish. And Hilton's work also gained a foothold as a sort of classic for the medium.

Random Harvest, in particular, sounded a sympathetic chord both when it first appeared (1941) and later on. World War II was in its second year and a successful outcome was far from assured. In that atmosphere, the story of Charles Ranier, a wealthy business tycoon and veteran of World War I who had for some months during and following the Great War lost his memory, presented itself as a paean to earlier and better times of old English values. These included a sort of feudal fantasy of intermingling social classes, unspoiled village life, and idyllic scenes of the countryside.

The twist in the story is that Ranier regains his memory lost due to shellshock (aka combat fatigue/PTSD) in 1917 but in so doing then loses his memory of the time he became hospitalized during the war until just around Christmas in 1920. Recovering those three years and merging them into Ranier's postwar life becomes the task of the novel.

Along the way, Hilton engages in some visionary preaching. These are the moments of greatest weakness in Random Harvest. Delivered by an old parson, these harangues cover everything from the League of Nations to the Common Law rights of villagers to restore their access to the commons being swallowed up by arrogant and distant members of the elite. There are also allusions to the rights and values of the working man in a reformed system of capitalism. (Did Hilton recognize the similarity between his social solutions and the corporatism of Mussolini?) In the end, he sort of espouses a Fabian socialist worldview without accompanying rules of parliamentary procedure. The only thing missing is an avowal of fruit juices and veganism.

So, yes, it's easy to punch holes in Hilton's literary world. But taken on its own terms, it nevertheless maintains its appeal. Is it a literary crime, after all, to write accessibly for the wider public? Should an author reject giving voice to a sense of unease in society simply because it is too common a feeling? And so what if he provides a satisfying answer that lifts people out of those moments of despair about their lack of being connected both to earlier generations and coming generations. Must everything end in modernist cynicism? And Hilton may have dealt in feelings primarily. But without them what do you have?

Finally, an interesting point of view for contemporary readers. While Hilton employed nostalgia for an England he saw disappearing into the abyss of World War II, readers today, of course, have an added level of nostalgia to encounter. There is not only that of the world before and right after World War I but the milieu of World War II in which Random Harvest first appeared. The two greatest political calamities of the twentieth century. And we are drawn back to them. Constantly. show less

Sandwiched between Armistice Day of World War I and the opening shots of World War II, this is the story of a man who lost his memory from shell shock in the first war, started to build a new life, and then had an accident that took his memory of that life while restoring his pre-war memory. On the surface it's a well-told romance with wonderful characters, both major and minor. Underneath, it's a metaphor for England, it's preparation for World War II and a disappearing way of life.

I liked this more than either Goodbye, Mr. Chips or Lost Horizon...both books that I enjoyed.

What a neat treat from a bygone era. Random Harvest was written in 1941 and was so popular at that time that it was #2 on the NYTimes Bestsellers of the Year list. It was immediately adapted to film, which was nominated for multiple Academy Awards, but I highly recommend reading the book first--it is so much better!

You may think that having been written more than 60 years ago would make it quaint, archaic or unapproachable, but it is anything but. It's a fabulous glimpse into those years between the wars.