Random Harvest (1941), by James Hilton*****

James Hilton

I finished reading it again today. This is another of my "best novels ever written," and this might really be the one. The story is set in England in the 1930's, and the atmosphere when Hitler is rising to power is so much like our situation in the U.S. today. "These are the last days," he said to me once. '"We are like people in a
trance--even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it--like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no  physical power to press down."'

In the course of the book, Charles Rainier loves two women, and I am never quite sure that the one who wins is the right one for him.

The character Rainier seems very similar to the hero of an earlier Hilton novel, Lost Horizon. They both recover from amnesia. They both want what neither can have: a quiet life, more spiritual than physical. However, the end of Lost Horizon may not have been the end for Conway; he might have made it back to Shangri-La--which, itself, existed under a shadowy threat for the future.