49 pages • 1 hour read
Jane HarperThe Lost Man
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
After dinner at the family’s ranch, Nathan remembers that a contractor was due to visit his house to fix the refrigerated pantry known as the “coolroom.” Living where they do, it is necessary to have months’ worth of food in case they are cut off due to weather. The coolroom is essential. He calls the contractor and, while he waits, flips through Cam’s wallet, which is sitting on the table. After he leaves a message, he goes into the living room, where Liz made up the couch for him. He studies a painting Cam made of the stockman’s grave that hangs over the fireplace—although he’s never liked it, he sees why people respond to it.
Through the window, he sees Ilse taking sheets off the clothesline and goes outside. She asks him to tell her about the crime scene, and he does. He thinks about when they met, 10 years earlier, just after his divorce from Jacqui. Ilse was a Dutch backpacker who picked up a job tending bar in Balamara. They chatted, and Nathan went back to the bar a few times. But then he was banned from town and still is. (The reader does not yet know the reason for this.)
Nathan asks if she heard from Cam on the radio the day he died. She says no. But she agrees with Bub and Harry that something was bothering Cam. When Ilse goes inside, Nathan sees Bub go to the grave of their father, Carl. He realizes that Cam will be buried next to him. Then Bub urinates on Carl’s grave, and Nathan reflects that he has good reason.
Chapter 9 Summary
Nathan, Bub, Harry, and Xander drive to meet Glenn (who has returned) at Cam’s car. On the way, they see Sophie, Cam’s eight-year-old daughter, exercising a horse with her arm in a sling. Her sister, five-year-old Lo, is drawing nearby. They stop to say hello, and Sophie tells them she hurt her arm when she fell off a horse.
Harry drives faster than Nathan, who has driven slowly since the accident that killed his father. While driving back from town with Liz, Carl swerved to avoid a cow and rolled the car. When Liz regained consciousness, she called for help on the radio, but by the time it got there, Carl was dead. Harry reminds Nathan of when he and Cam ran away as children and went to the stockman’s grave. When Xander asks why they ran away, Nathan lies and says he doesn’t remember.
Glenn is waiting for them at Cam’s car. He already examined it and tells them they can take it home. The car wasn’t tampered with, and there are no signs of struggle. He starts to say that if anyone had seen the car, they would have stopped, but then looks at Nathan and is embarrassed. He asks about firearms at the property, and Harry reports that they are all accounted for and secure. Glenn apologizes to Nathan for his comment about people stopping at the car. He also tells Nathan not to shut his radio off, as he’s known to do when out on his property.
After Glenn leaves, Nathan and Xander plan to drive Cam’s car back to the house. When Nathan gets in the driver’s seat, he adjusts it back. Xander points out that Harry knew where to turn for Cam’s car, even though the turn was so hidden that Bub and Nathan missed it the previous day. Nathan tries to explain it away, but the observation sticks in his mind.
Chapter 10 Summary
Nathan and Xander discuss why Cam left his car hidden behind the rocks, making it unlikely anyone would see it and stop. Xander’s words cause Nathan to recall the incident that led him to be shunned by his community. Years before, he stopped to get gas and ran into Jacqui’s father, Keith, who told him he was paying a lawyer to get full custody of Xander for Jacqui. They argued, and Keith accused Nathan of being like his father. Nathan barely stopped himself from hitting Keith. He got in his car and drove away. Later, Nathan saw Keith’s car stopped on the road and Keith leaning against it. Keith waved at him to stop but Nathan, still angry about the custody battle, drove by.
Chapter 11 Summary
Nathan turned around and went back, but Keith was gone. He radioed Balamara and was told that Keith was rescued but was spreading the story that Nathan drove past him without stopping.
The news of Nathan’s action spread, and the community united to condemn him—leaving someone on the road was unforgivable. Nathan apologized at a town meeting, but Balamara turned its back on him. He was banned from every store, and Glenn forbade the post office and gas station to serve him. Nathan’s staff quit, and his contractors stopped working with him. One day, he woke up to realize he was completely alone.
After his exile, Nathan tried to call Ilse at the bar, but the manager hung up on him. He drove into town several times and sat in the parking lot because he couldn’t go inside. He never saw her. He asked Cam to talk to her on his behalf, but Cam refused, and Nathan stopped speaking to him for three months.
Nathan and Xander arrive at the stockman’s grave, and while waiting for Harry and Bub, Xander looks through Cam’s glove compartment. He finds instructions for repairing the broken mast on Lehmann’s Hill, showing that he intended to go there, and can’t figure out how he ended up at the stockman’s grave instead.
Keith died a few years later, and Jacqui’s mother moved to Brisbane to be closer to her and Xander. Nathan hoped Keith’s death would improve his community status, but if anything, it made it worse. Ten years later, he was still waiting to be invited back into the community.
Chapter 12 Summary
When Nathan and Xander return to the farm, Liz is waiting on the porch. The funeral is scheduled for Christmas Eve day, and she expects all the neighbors to attend, as Cam was well liked and respected.
Thinking of how Harry found the turnoff to Cam’s car so easily, Nathan asks Liz if Cam and Harry were getting along. She jumps to Harry’s defense, but he can tell she is thinking about something. She tells them that Sophie and Lo are upset, but it’s hard to tell how they feel about Cam’s death.
Chapter 13 Summary
Bub plays a video game in the living room, and when he and Nathan see Katy walk by, he admits to a crush on her. Nathan says he saw Bub urinating on their father’s grave, but Bub just laughs. Nathan knows that Bub has more reason to hate Carl than anyone—he was born 10 years after Cam and suffered the worst of their father’s abuse.
During dinner, Glenn calls, wanting to talk to Ilse. In the police records, he found that a woman called asking if Cam still lived at Burley Downs. When Nathan finds out that the woman was Jenna Moore, he is surprised, as he hasn’t heard her name in 20 years.
Chapter 14 Summary
The next day, while Nathan, Bub, and Xander are on their way to Lehmann’s Hill to do the repairs, Xander asks who Jenna Moore is. Bub wants to hear the story too, as he was only seven years old when it happened.
Nathan says that when he was 19 and Cam was 17, they went to a party in the dunes with other kids. Jenna, a backpacker, was working on Jacqui’s family’s station with her boyfriend, who wasn’t at the party. Cam and Jenna spent the night talking and flirting, and Nathan left the party with Jacqui. The next day, everyone talked about Cam and Jenna having sex in the dunes. Jacqui later told Nathan later that Jenna was quiet on the way home; however, she broke her silence the following day.
Chapter 15 Summary
She said she didn’t want to have sex with Cam, but he forced himself on her. The community didn’t believe her because she flirted with Cam at the party and was older than him. Jenna and her boyfriend left town soon after and the incident was forgotten.
At Lehmann’s Hill, Nathan repairs the mast, while Bub reflects that he should have looked for Cam earlier that day. He didn’t because he was angry. He wants to move, but Cam wouldn’t buy his share of the farm. Nathan stuns Bub by confessing that he let his gun license lapse and surrendered his weapons to Glenn. After he was shunned by his community, Nathan noticed that Steve and Glenn began manufacturing reasons to check on him. He thought letting his license lapse might set their minds at ease. He asks Bub not to tell Xander, who already worries about Nathan.
Nathan wonders why Jenna contacted Cam after all these years. Xander asks Nathan whether he believed Cam’s denials, and Nathan remembers that Cam cried after the incident. Xander points out that two people can have different experiences of the same event.
Chapters 8-15 Analysis
Harper keeps the brutal environment at the center of the story. Something as small as a missed appointment with a repairman is potentially dangerous. Nathan first reveals that he is banned from Balamara and later why. These passages establish the theme of Depending on Community. The mysteries within the family deepen as Bub urinates on his father’s grave. Several points of family history are revealed, including Carl and Liz’s car accident and Nathan and Cam running away from home.
The investigation also moves forward. Glenn appears but doesn’t provide any answers. Xander continues to show keen observational skills when he points out how easily Harry found the turnoff to Cam’s car. Nathan takes his son’s comments seriously. His Learning to Be a Father involves recognizing and supporting his son’s talents in ways Carl apparently never offered his boys. Bub’s attitude toward their father suggests that Nathan grew up in an environment of paternal abuse, which he seems determined not to pass on to Xander.
Unlike most murder mysteries, The Lost Man leaves it unclear whether the victim was murdered in the first place. Glenn thinks Cam may have died by suicide. Cam’s mental health before his death continues to be a topic and is tied to the harsh realities of the outback. These realities also affect Nathan. Glenn and others have been worried about him for some time. This worry is emphasized by Bub’s shock that Nathan let his gun license lapse, leaving himself defenseless on his property. Yet the reason he let it lapse is even more telling—he knew Glenn and Steve were worried about him harming himself.
In Chapter 10, the story of Nathan’s exile is finally revealed. He committed the unforgivable crime of driving past someone stranded on the road. The theme of Depending on Community rises to the surface as Balamara turns its back on Nathan for violating the principle that makes life in the outback possible: mutual support regardless of personal differences. Many of the small mysteries of the early chapters are answered with this revelation, such as why Glenn is so concerned with Nathan’s mental health. To be shunned for 10 years in a place that is already so isolated places an enormous burden on Nathan.
Jenna Moore is introduced—a figure from the past whose contact with Cam after so many years seems suspicious to Nathan. Her entrance amplifies the theme of The Culture of Silence. The family’s denial concerning Carl’s treatment of his children and Cam’s likely sexual assault of Jenna highlight the culture of silence around abuse, assault, and intergenerational trauma. When Nathan tells Bub and Xander about Cam and Jenna, he begins the process of honesty and reckoning. It will eventually expose the reason for Cam’s death.
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