A pantomime with real bombs
Alan Wall
HATCHETT AND LYCETT by Nigel Williams Viking, £10.99, pp.424, ISBN 0670912557 0 ne of the problems all historical fiction confronts is usage. At its most parodic the genre has people thee-ing it and thouing it about the place, wearing lacy sleeves that always hang down well below the fingers. The history recounted in Hatchett and Lycett is dated much nearer home, but there are still some notable wobbles. Would someone in 1939 really have referred to 'the Spanish teacher being humped by the chemistry master'? The term was indeed current here in the 18th century but it fell into disuse by the early 19th, emigrated to America and only returned to these shores half way through the last century. Its occurrence here is a little premature.
Similarly, this from 1940 is troubling: 'He was dying for a leak. But it didn't feel safe to point Percy at the scenery when so many hostile soldiers were still out there, just waiting to get a glimpse of his toclger.' Here the anachronisms have taken on a cosmopolitan air. 'Leak' might have sounded streetwise in New York at the time, but in Croydon? Percy didn't poke his way into the lexicon of private parts until the 1960s, and that was in Australia. Todger, or tadger, was originally a north-country term of dialectal endearment for the male member, until Oliver Reed got started on his one-man campaign to make its employment well-nigh compulsory from Land's End to John O'Groats.
It's also hard to believe that people referred to the Dunkirk spirit' while in the act of evacuating Dunkirk, or that a vicar in 1939 could say of Christ that he didn't 'really die at all'. However witless the incumbent, he would surely have been taught that docetism was a major heresy.
These quibbles aside, the really thorny question raised by Hatchett and Lycett is this: why graft a murder mystery over the real historical events of 1939-40? In the early stages of the book, various female Spanish teachers (and it's hard to believe there were quite so many of them in Croydon, even in the heyday of Franco and Picasso) get bumped off by techniques borrowed with lethal literalism from Agatha Christie, In the process of solving these crimes and more to follow we also discover the secret underlying the relationship between the two main male characters. Hatchett and Lycett, who by the end could easily be renamed Hack It and Lose It, since that is what they respectively do, the It in question being the love of Norma, but also the confrontation of life in all its horror, beauty and responsibility. There is also a sub-plot involving a German refugee, the daughter of an eminent Jewish scientist, who arrives bearing secrets that might turn out to be crucial for the war effort.
Much of the book is moving, compelling and very funny, but it's hard not to feel sometimes, when the elaborate murder plot comes back fully into focus, that one's attending a pantomime while real bombs fall on to the roof overhead. There is surely a curious innocence to the genre of murder mystery, which is part of the solace it offers — despite the dark deeds, there is no real evil, only crime and misdemeanour, only puzzle and answer. The conundrum is the plot, the denouement the solution. You can't solve evil, though, not real evil, not the evil represented by the Nazis: you can meditate upon it, you can fight it, you can even succumb to it, but you can't solve it. It is a true mystery, a depth beyond the fathoming of the conscious mind. At the end of the book one has the odd sensation that only the most trivial parts of the story have been solved. Or could that be the point?
It certainly carries you along, all the same, as one would expect of Williams, and it has many intriguing insights along the way, not least on the subject of twinhood, the psychological and moral doubling of ourselves. At the end all the characters have to stare hard at what they thought they had rejected and say along with Prospero, 'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine'.
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