By delayed exposure
James Michie
MASTER GEORGIE by Beryl Bainbridge Duckworth, £14.99, pp. 190 Beryl Bainbridge's new 'historical fiction' starts with a murky mystery in her own Liverpool, in 1848, and finishes eight years later in the fog of the field of Inker- man. A thick mist also surrounds the main characters — origins, motives, relation- ships, sexual natures, even apparent facts are open to doubt — and it is one's enjoy- able job to keep wide awake, pick up the clues and attain by the end a clearer, if not perfectly clear, focus.
This is a key word because the book is divided into six photographic 'Plates', each a narration by one of three protagonists who believe they are presenting the whole truth; yet the camera, as we know, can be as fallible as the person behind the shutter; we are not what we seem, but we cannot keep up the pretence for ever. War, too, is not quite what it seems: the last page features a dead man propped up among a group of smiling soldiers, 'to show the folks back home'.
Myrtle is an orphan, found 'beside the body of a woman whose throat had been nibbled by rats', and taken in by the Hardy family whose eldest son, Master Georgie, is a medical student and also a photography buff; Beatrice is his sister; Pompey Jones is an odd lad with a deformed upper lip who becomes a photographer's assistant; Dr Potter, a sceptical geologist, is a family friend. All are linked by knowledge, or half knowledge, of a disgraceful incident in the past. By the time they set off on a pleasure trip to the Crimea, via Constantinople and Varna, George is a qualified doctor, accompanied by his wife Annie and Dr Potter is married to Beatrice, also one of the party. The narrators throughout are Myrtle, Pompey and Dr Potter.
That's all I'm going to reveal, because the essence of Master Georgie is mystery, and the triumph of the author lies in not throwing light on truths too early and at the same time not keeping us in the dark too long. The narrations are handled with great skill; only once is there recourse to the old eavesdropper's trick: 'I was out from behind the clock in a flash and into the clothes cupboard.' There are pleasingly grotesque scenes which Cruikshank would have itched to illustrate: a corpse is surrep- titiously conveyed in a Punch and Judy van, a senile ape is photographed being operat- ed on for cataract, a collie pup is torn to shreds by a pack of Turkish alley curs, in the Crimea the Rifle Brigade put on a con- cert starring a spectacular fire-eater (`the colonel said it was a damn dangerous thing to try, and there was no trickery in it'). Small period details are telling: There being nothing else available in the way of splints he was forced to use the paste- board covers of a book — The Wide, Wide World — to set the injury.
Even the most fleeting characters man- age to be memorable such as the crazy archaeologist, Gustave Streicher, who trips over the snoozing Potter in Constantinople, or Colonel Tuckett, 'who had gained notoriety in bringing an action against the Earl of Cardigan for taking a pot-shot at him on Wimbledon Common'. Bainbridge is equally good at portraying the quirks of speech and behaviour of both sexes: Myrtle (a name too close to Beryl for comfort?) is convincingly sharp-eared, lynx-eyed and simultaneously tough and tender; Dr Potter, brave, blunt, intelligent but unintu- itive, is the sort of male she has a soft spot for and delights in creating; George, the enigma, I leave to the reader. The cholera and confused carnage which they and Pompey get sucked into make a grand, gruesome finale.
To find fault is not easy. Perhaps Bainbridge's hatred of war, coupled with her penchant for the macabre, leads her into too many sudden, violent deaths, in ghastly studio 'poses'. I doubt whether `stomp' or 'sashay' were in the English vocabulary of the time. I regret that the `You really must meet Derek He's a scream.' publishers have omitted to list her previous books in the prelims, and, whatever her feelings about the camera, I would have welcomed a photograph of her on the back of the jacket and a less murky and mysterious picture on the front.
I have read her last two books, about Captain Scott and the Titanic. This is a worthy companion. I'm a fan. For others like me there's no need to recommend a trip to the nearest bookshop; if you haven't yet joined the club, go and buy Master Georgie.
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