Fiction
Fatal pash
Paul Ableman
An Easter Egg Hint Gillian Freeman (Hamish Hamilton pp. 192, £6.95) This is a mystery story in more senses than one. It is, in the first place, a conventional mystery centering cn the disappearance of a girl from a private school in the later part of the first world war. But a mysterious allegory about Easter also lurks, not too impenetrably concealed, within the narrative. There is, however, a third mystery which tended to obscure for me both the temporal and the spiritual dimensions of the work. This is the mystery of how an accomplished author, with an impressive range of achievement behind her, could have perpetrated the grammatical atrocities that swarm throughout.
A few examples will have to suffice. 'Had the colloquial "bird's eye view" become a human possibility that Sunday, it would have been observed that almost equidistant to the parish church, but from opposite directions, came the girls from Fairwater House and the cadet squad from the Royal Flying Corps barracks on the outskirts of Fairwater Edge.' This is a vile, ungrammatical sentence in need of more repairs than a brand-new British car. My entire allotted space would barely suffice for detailed analysis and rectification and so I must leave it to each reader mentally to wrench it into English. The author refers several times to 'footsteps' which walk and run. Footsteps, being the incorporeal essence of both walking and running, can themselves do neither. A 'cave-like opening' in a hill is a Zenoesque paradox. It cannot be a cave and it cannot be other than one. A character has nightmares but does not 'dream', a subtle affliction. A 'visit' is compared to an 'apple', again confusing the abstract with the concrete. Sentences are repeatedly separated by commas rather than full-stops. This gratuitous fault, and other examples of bad punctuation, could, and should, have been eliminated by the editor. The combination of poor writing and negligent editing has resulted in a book more riddled with solecisms than any other I have recently encountered. In fairness, it should be added that the writing is not uniformlY bad. In fact, at her best, Miss Freeman is capable of generating excellent passages like: 'Florrie worked in the glow of the red oil lamp. Her little darkroom was warm and stuffy and as she poured the developing fluid into a dish she thought that in a way she was summoning up Madeleine's presence, as a medium might.' This is a short book, divided into three parts. The first part is introduced with the words: 'The following short story was first published in An Argosy of Mystery Tales, Christmas 1917. Part two is introduced by a letter to the editor of Argosy dated 14 June 1926, which purports to be from a lady who can throw more light on the mystery adumbrated in Part one. She encloses a manuscript for publication but the editor rejects it. Part three is announced by another letter from the same lady dated 5 December 1939, enclosing the solution to the mystery. I was relieved to reach it since I had begun to fear that the book would prove a specimen of the 'atmospheric' mystery to which each reader must supply his own solution. But no, Miss Freeman plays fair. The tale is a complicated one but Madeleine's disappearance, the reasons for it and the girl's ultimate fate are all explained in the end.
Seventeen-year-old Madeleine is evactlated from France to be part student and part teacher at her aunt's private school near the villages of Fairwater Edge and Fairwater Green in England. Less than a year later, she issues forth with younger girls to hide Easter Eggs for a charity Easter Egg hunt and is never seen again. What happened to Madeleine? The mystery is presented in classical form with various dark possibilities. Could Edwin Reed, the up-market village idiot whose family is aristocratic, have had anything to do with it? What of Doctor Robert Ford who came back from the war terribly wounded and whose eyes met Madeleine's in a long, burning look while he was carried, swathed in bandages, from the train returning him to the district? It is not fair, in my opinion, for a reviewer to destroy suspense and that makes this book, which unfolds the mystery in gradual stages, hard to discuss. I will confine myself to saying that I was not really persuaded that, in such a close-knit community, the key incidents would have totally escaped detection. I was also unconvinced that Madeleine could have remained where she ended up without being found. Much more important, from a literary perspective, the characters seemed to me undeveloped and the plot an uneasy melange of naturalism and melodrama. Nor was I sure that the sense of period was firm. 'He has to be sweet on Madame', surely anticipates colloquial American usage of four to five decades later? For all that, the narrative has pace and a certain nostalgic charm and you do wonder anxiously what could have become of Madeleine.
As for the spiritual mystery hidden within the orthodox one, I am not theologian enough to unravel it. Indeed, I may be up to that old trick of critics, over-ambitious to be accounted erudite, who discover arcane significance where none is intended. But When you have a narrative with Easter in the title and which also includes biblically evocative elements like a cave and a kind of crucifixion on a tree (a fatal plane crash in a wood) and when the heroine is called Madeleine, which is the French version of the name derived from the woman of Magdala who sinned and was forgiven, the error, if one there be, is understandable.
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