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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is another book that I did a disservice to by waiting so long to review it, but I will try. I thought this was a beautiful book, and TARDIS like: its bigger on the inside. It covers more than its story seems to, at first glance; it hides a thoughtfulness and a sadness that runs like a strand through many of Hilton's war-touched books.

Random Harvest appears at first glance to be a mystery and a love story. Through the narration of Charles’ Rainier’s secretary and confidant, it tells Rainier’s story. The novel begins in the late 1930s, as the coming spectre of World War II loomed over the country, but soon cycles backwards, to 1919, when Rainier woke up with no memory of the previous two years of his life. He returned to his upper class family, returned the family business to success, and gave up his own scholarly dreams in favor of a life of business and politics, in which he gained prominence. It recounts his love story with a young woman and the dissolution of their engagement. Mrs. Rainier remains somewhat of an enigma; excellent at running his life, someone he appreciates but perhaps does not love. Through all, there is a thread of loss, surrounding those lost years that he could never quite regain. It is likely not much of a spoiler that he does finally remember, of course, and we learn what happened to him during those two years, which he spent as John Smith, and in the end how those new memories affect his life and identity as Charles Rainier.

I watched the movie before I realized it was a book by Hilton, and so was spoiled for an important part of the story. In some ways, it spoilt it for me, because I did not have the benefit of a literary device that worked quite well in the book. On the other hand, knowing this part of the story enriched my reading in some ways; it gave me a different perspective on the story and its development. Still, I would recommend that one read this book without being spoiled.

As a result, I’m somewhat limited in how much I can in my review. Much of the analysis of characters and writing is necessarily tied up with the storytelling, and too much discussion might give it away.

What I did want to mention is that Hilton does not get the credit he deserves, I think. He was popular in his day, but has not retained that popularity in subsequent years. Too sentimental, perhaps; too easy. Indeed, when I’ve been away from Hilton too long, I start to doubt my own reading of him and begin to underestimate him again. Random Harvest is a beautiful story, as is the film adaptation of it. But the novel also is much more than that. It is a story of loss; of people lost, of self lost; of culture lost. The inexorable march of war hangs over the novel, pulling England in, pulling the reader in, as someone who knows what must come. Hilton is sometimes accused of dealing too sentimentally with pre-war England, but I do not know if I agree. If anything, he was harsh about the country’s failings, though the harshness was hidden in a guise of his pleasant writing style. Rainier embodied the British ideal, perhaps, but Hilton did not reflect that ideal in the British society he conveyed.

Hilton is, at heart, a storyteller. His focus is on his characters and on the story he lays out for them. His writing is deft, accessible, and simple. He writes a good romance; he writes a good hero. And then, inserted in his narrative, will be these arresting moments of writing: an offhanded comment by the narrator or a character about something bigger. You ache with sadness and loss when you read these asides, with the knowledge that we have about what would come and the almost prescient knowledge that Hilton seemed to have about just how devastating the war would be (Hilton published this book in 1941; Germany had already advanced through much of Europe, but much more was yet to come in the war). The war played, in this book, a similar role that it played in Remains of the Day. Hilton has a way of writing that lets you slip over the fact that some of these characters, Rainier in particular, is profoundly damaged; and suddenly you must remember. Hilton does not beat you over the head with anything—not his morals, not his politics, not his themes. He tells his story, but there it is, between the lines and in these. Like Rainier, the book is straightforward, and dutiful, well-mannered, unpretentious. And there lurks, beneath a very likeable and highly readable veneer, something else, something meaningful.

Hilton is the kind of writer who sticks with you. You read and when you finish, you feel a bit quieter inside; and you find yourself returning to that feeling in the days subsequent; and you also find yourself returning to those moments where the novel got just a bit bigger than its story.

This book contains some of the most beautiful snippets of writing. I truly enjoyed reading it and recommend it highly.

Random Harvest is one of my favorite movies. Made in 1942 and starring Greer Garson and Ronald Coleman, this movie tugged at my heartstrings. So, when the Kindle version of the original book became available, I wanted to read the story that inspired this much loved movie. Unfortunately, in this case, the movie for me was actually better than the book. The book is more philosophical and doesn't focus on the bittersweet story as much as the movie. More concerned with the war and politics of the day, this book is interesting, but lacks the warmth that the movie creates. Mrs. Rainer is somewhat of a mystery and remains an aloof character. Charles is at times sympathetic and at times annoying.

Unlike the movie, the book begins with a train conversation in which two men meet and Charles reveals to the stranger that there is a span of time after he fought in WWI where he can't remember. He shares how he was found after being hit by a car and cannot remember why he was in Liverpool nor what had happened to him in the previous two years between being wounded in the war and then being hit by a car. The story progresses from there with Charles always searching for the lost memories. The book is divided into 5 parts and goes from past to present until we are finally clued in to what happened during those missing years towards the end of the book. The movie takes the opposite approach as we see what happened when Charles was wounded to the present. In someways, this approach is more meaningful because the audience knows the truth while we painfully watch Charles fumbling around for his lost memories. The book is worth a read, but to me the movie will always be better.

The movie version of Random Harvest is one of my favorites, so I was sure I'd enjoy the book. I really wish I could have read the book first. It was such an excellent romantic mystery, but I couldn't take back the knowledge that I knew how it would end. Both are great in their own way, but definitely read the book FIRST :)