The sport of a mad mother
Philip Glazebrook
THE WOMAN WHO WAS GOD by Francis King
Hutchinson, £10.95, pp. 288
There is a relief in putting yourself into the hands of so accomplished a constructor of fiction as Francis King, which encour- ages you to suspend disbelief, suspend too to some extent the critical organs, and allow credulity a long rein. You accept that the novelist in the pages of his book may claim to be God, creating a real world. So, if at the finish you find that your credibil- ity, or naivety, has been manipulated, as it was in my case with The Woman Who Was God, you feel a little sore. I detected in my notes for this review a huffish tone (now eliminated, I hope) which would not reflect my admiration for the professionalism with which I had been taken for a ride by Mr King.
The novel's protagonist is a dimmish, drabbish woman possessed by the belief that her only son's death in a quasi- religious 'community' in Africa was not an accident. Unable to impose this obsessive Idea on her ex-husband, or on the author- ities — the official outward world com- posed of the interlocking trivia which prevents its disintegration — she resolves to travel to Africa to impose on the very scene of the event a version of that event which will not tear such a hole in the interlocking trivia which comprises her own interior world as to cause her own disintegration. She sets out to alter the reality which does not fit in with her preconceptions; and (the author assures us in the book's last line) she succeeds. Truth is no match for obsession.
Mr King has conceived the idea of writing a novel from the subjective view- point of this woman whose mental instabil- ity, known to her friends and evident to observers, is not revealed to the reader, who is gulled into taking her views serious- ly. The irony of this trick played upon his credulity only becomes clear to the reader when he has finished the book — hence my pique — but, more important, the point and direction of much of the matter in the book is not evident (or was not evident to me) save in retrospect. Take for instance this passage:
At a meeting of the WI, when old Mrs Perrott, always out of touch because of the distance of her dilapidated, thatched cottage from the village, suggested that 'that nice Mrs St Just' should be asked to join the sub-committee for the summer fete, the vicar's wife said in a hushed voice, almost as though Ruth might be outside the door listening: 'Oh, I hardly think . . not at the moment. . .', and everyone silently nodded.
In retrospect I see that I might have gathered from this paragraph that Ruth was bonkers and everyone knew it; but, in reading the passage, I have to confess to impatience with what seemed an excess of detail about people and circumstances old Mrs Perrott, the summer fete — which we never hear of again.
Altogether, in my unenlightened state, the narrative seemed to me at times excessively prolix and clogged with detail, every object and person weighted down with epithets. Though respectfully alert, as Mr King's reader is bound to be, I was looking for conventional direction-posts, and I did not see in the merciless accumula- tion of trivia the haunted, confused, threatening world that presses in upon a demented woman. I began to tire of characters who came in through one door, were minutely described in both appear- ance and background, only to disappear
through another door forever. Fortunately I had my wits about me when the signifi- cant character at last burst into Mrs St Just's cabin on an African ferry. Dave is a journalist who wants to be a novelist: wants to be, that is, not a reporter of facts but an inventor of them, like a madwoman or God. He abets her. It is his newspaper article that hatches out her obsession into a cockatrice of mischief with the power to invade the real world, and to overturn the `community'
The 'community's' motto is Aleister Crowley's apothegm, `Do what you will is the whole of the law'. The notion of such moral laxity, as applied to her son, is what has most horrified Mrs St Just. Here too is a difficulty for the reader, who sees, when he is at last shown the 'community', that Crowley's dictum has led only to the usual sorry perversions of the Sunday papers, not at all to the 'strange, terrible things' that so darken and appal poor Mrs St Just's mind. Not privy to her dementia, the reader will not feel his flesh creep with horror, as hers does, at the notion of a white baby being raised by blacks in an African village, even if the child is the physical result of an incestuous rela- tionship.
Such difficulties (which will perhaps not beset a more percipient reader at all) Mr King has brought on himself by the form he has chosen for his novel. I must not carp, or sound peevish. Seen in retrospect, Mr King's control of character and situation is thoroughly efficient — early in the book he shows us a predatory youth scrounging sustenance in a café, and shows us in masterly fashion how Mrs St Just domin- ates his aggression — and we may be confident that the effects produced are those intended. Now and again the heart of some matter is touched in a few words, so that we see the universal under the particu- lar (I would cite the wretched woman trying to imagine her son normal and happy among friends, and finding it im- possible: 'the realisation of that impossibil- ity,' says Mr King, 'filled her with sad- ness'). Then there is the felicity of images: watching an incident which hints at vices she dreads, Mrs St Just 'felt knowledge glide into her, as slithery and venomous as a snake'. And then there is a down-at-heel Greek shipping-clerk who is called, I am glad to say, Taki. All these skills and congruities I enjoyed, and I found too that the atmosphere of the 'community' in its old slaving-station had worked into my mind (though readers familiar with Sri Aurobindo's ashram at Pondicherry, simi- larly ruled by a woman known as 'Mother', may find the two places run together in their thoughts).
Mr King has constructed a novel which is cunningly planned and skilfully executed: my cavil is that its shapeliness is only apparent to me in retrospect, when the tendency of what has seemed supereroga- tory may be appreciated.
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