Random Harvest by james hilton

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Published in 1940, James Hilton’s novel “Random Harvest” tells the story of a young WWI British Army veteran who has suffered from shell shock and severe memory loss that plagues him for many years thereafter. The son of a wealthy industrialist and a member of a greedy and dysfunctional family, it falls on his shoulders to save the family business while dealing with the huge gap in his memory. This is an outstanding book full of intrigue and romantic drama the concludes with an unexpected and shocking conclusion.

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TheGon

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

My grandma gifted this book to me and she said it was her favorite book of all time so I had to read it. It took me a while to get into, but after getting to the end, I was so surprised at how much I enjoyed it!

"'What did you do in the Great War?' But even the most cynical of us couldn't see ahead to a time when the only logical answer to that question would be another one--WHICH Great War?'"
-James Hilton

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yann-chan

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

James Hilton is one of the best story tellers of all time. The intrigue he conjures up makes you compelled to keep reading to the end.

Random Harvest tells about a chance encounter on a train between Charles Rainier, a very wealthy man, and the narrator, Harrison. Charles had lost years of memory after being injured in the First World War. The two men seemed to bond and Charles felt he could confide in the younger man. He tells him that after a fall he suddenly became aware of whom he was on a park bench in Liverpool, but the few years prior to that were obliterated.

Harrison and Charles, an MP, found they happened to be going to the same convention. Their chance encounter was to turn into an enduring association and throughout the book Charles reveals more and more about his past life, obsessing about parts he still couldn’t remember. The finale reveals a surprising twist that I didn’t see coming. It was such a poignant ending.

The novel, although very old (1941), doesn’t feel dated. But you get the feel of that era, which I loved. I equally enjoyed Lost Horizon.

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rcdeidara

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

James Hilton was a mid-twentieth-century English writer of bestselling middlebrow tearjerkers, a bit like Nevil Shute. He is best known today for two books that became blockbuster movies: Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Lost Horizon, which gave the world Shangri-La.

Random Harvest is a typical example of his work. The hero, a reluctant but successful between-the-wars business magnate and politician, is haunted by missing memories: he has lost three whole years. The lacuna commences with his being wounded in a failed decoy operation during the First World War and ends with him coming to himself on a park bench in Liverpool moments after having been knocked down by a car. The book is about those lost years, and the hero's hunt for them. It is told by his (male) private secretary, a man who knows all his employer's secrets except those the latter cannot recall himself. All is finally revealed, and there is a completely unexpected – to me, at least – twist at the ending, put there to ensure that the reader closes the book more or less satisfied, no matter what has gone before.

Random Harvest is a well-plotted, well-written, polite novel. Those who wish to be intellectually or politically challenged by what they read will find nothing to engage them here; indeed, the anodyne prose and precision-tuned plotting contain little that will excite or challenge anybody. That is not its function, nor its virtue; it is a book written to help middle-aged, middle-class, politically moderate readers pass the time on trains, or fall asleep at night

At this it succeeds wonderfully, if at the expense of a tendency to drag – a tendency that grows so pronounced at times that it prompted me to give the book three stars instead of the four it might otherwise have received.

Writers like Hilton and Shute appealed mainly to the middle-class, more or less conservative English reader of their day. A large part of that appeal lay in their ability to evoke and champion a stable, well-ordered Anglocentric world that was crumbling even as they wrote; they offered (false, as it turned out) assurance that England would always endure, that the sons of the shires would ever, as in Housman’s poem, get them the sons their fathers got, and there would be honey still for tea until the end of time. They chronicled the long afterglow of Victorian England, and their appeal was nostalgic even in their heyday; it is doubly so now, if only to the dwindling band for whom such things ever had an appeal in the first place.

I don't think this is a book for Americans; the sort of comic, exaggerated P.G. Wodehouse caricature of Englishness they love so much is not in evidence here. Some elderly Canadians (fans of Robertson Davies in his lighter moments, perhaps) will enjoy it; and wherever nostalgia for the days when Britain ordered and set standards for the world still persist – for example, in former British colonies gone bad, like my own country – a few ageing readers will rediscover a seduction here to which it does no harm, now and again, to yield.

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HzSmart

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

James Hilton, author of Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizon, was a best-selling author of his day (the 1930s to the 1950s) but, like so many popular writers, his writing is ignored by the literary establishment, dismissed as the sentimental harking back to a lost pre-lapsarian or at least pre-Great-War England. It's not true. What his work is, rather, is an examination, through carefully crafted stories, of the trauma of the Great War and the presentiment of the greater war coming soon. Not all writers working in the interregnum between the wars sensed that there would be another conflict; most wrote on oblivious to the gathering storm. Whether Hilton was consciously aware of this, or simply sensed it, I do not know, but the foreboding of the future is there even while the characters in this story deal with the long aftermath of the First World War.

The story moves between points of view, starting in the first person with a graduate student meeting Charles Rainier, an eminent figure in politics and business, but then switches to the third person as we learn that Rainier served in the Great War, was injured and lost his memory, waking up two years later in Liverpool having completely forgotten what happened in those lost years. Rainier returns to his family and, while curiously detached, he helps save the family business, saving many livelihoods, and enters politics, all from a basic sense of doing his best but with an underlying void and loss.

The story is essentially about Rainier's rediscovery of what happened to him during his lost years and the twist at the end is beautifully engineered. It's a subtle, moving story about loss and recovery, written before anyone had come up with the term post-traumatic stress disorder by a writer from a generation that had more right to be stressed than any other in history.

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wabbajackov

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I did like the book, but it was sentimental and improbable. The most interesting aspect of the book for me was the time in which he was writing it. After suffering through the first world war, he was justifiably anxious and certainly not naive in the first days of World War two; even so, I would have liked to of asked him if the brutal reality of World War II was even worse than what he had anticipated in those early days.

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TungstenOre

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I came to the book because I love the film, but the two are entirely different. The film starts with 'Smithy' having lost his memory after suffering shellshock in WW1 and living in an asylum. Whilst everyone's celebrating the declaration of peace, he wanders out into the town where he meets Paula. She helps get him away and rebuild his life. Without giving anything away, he later reclaims memories of his pre-war life.

However, the book opens with 'Smithy' having recovered his pre-war memory several years before. He's now running the family business and tells his life story to his biographer. This constant reminisence sometimes makes the action feel distant and disconnected. Memories of the war and the years immediately after it still elude him, although he gets occasional flashes of remembrance. The 'Paula' part of the story only comes into the narrative at around 60% and is not as fully developed as the film version.

The book was beautifully written, however, and I'd certainly read more of James Hilton's work. But it was one of the rare occasions when I enjoyed the film more than the book.

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ramenhotline

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I read this mainly because I love the movie version so much. Book has similar plot and is ultimately satisfying but Hilton's philosophical digressions are less interesting. It made me appreciate the film even more seeing how the filmmakers skillfully distilled the book into a sweet and somewhat unusual love story. If you haven't seen the film, put it on your list -- Greer Garson and Ronald Colman are delightful.

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Random Harvest

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