Fiction
Unthrilling
Paul Ableman
The Fate of Mary Rose Caroline Blackwood (Cape pp. 208, £5.95) This is a disappointing novel. It promises more than it delivers. The author has style and imagination but she is not using them at full throttle. Or such is my impression. Possibly this book really does represent Caroline Blackwood's best form but it reads like talent sacrificed to the quest for sales. The sad thing is that this endeavour almost always results in the debasement of talent without the desired elevation of sales. Even unsophisticated readers recognise when they are being patronised and they resent it.
Miss Blackwood's book is dispiriting in another way too, although this is doubtless intentional. The work is, in essence, a thriller and, to generate a mood of menace and suspense, the author has purged her work of all joy, humour, light or amiability. All the characters are unpleasant and the most unpleasant are vile. There is no-one to identify with, not even the child named in the title.
Mary Rose? Now where have we encountered that name before? I located it uncertainly peeping out of the posy of fey memories which is all I retain from the time, several decades ago, when I read most of the whimsical plays of James Barrie. But I needed a reference book to remind me that 'Mary Rose' is, in fact, the title of the one about `a child-bride who disappears on a Hebridean magic island'. She surfaces again here, in what is doubtless a calculated echo, as a child of six. 'Her face was small and pinched and she had irregular features. Her arms and legs were like small white sticks. She had a chest that was puny and illdeveloped. Under her eyes there were faint mauve patches of tension.' Her father, the fictitious narrator of the novel, continues: 'I tried my best to feel a little affection for Mary Rose, but I found it difficult. She was such a dim, timid child and she seemed to have so little personality.'
The father, one Rowan Anderson, has, as that passage suggests, manoeuvred him self into a psychologically intolerable situation. We are told that he is a historian of some reputation who enjoys a comfortable standard of living. His professional life is only marginal to the story but it is plausibly adumbrated. Rowan lives chiefly for his work and even his mistress, Gloria, a fashionable journalist and model, is kept strictly in the background. He and Gloria have fierce rows and, after one of them, Rowan buys her some flowers as a peace offering and, on impulse, dates the beautiful girl who sells them to him.
Over dinner, he finds the flower girl neurotic, disturbing and disagreeable but, virtually at her instigation, takes her home and goes to bed with her, discovering her to be a virgin. Some months later, she visits him and tells him that she is pregnant. Ultimately, he marries her, installs her in a bijou cottage in a bijou village and, feeling that he has fulfilled his moral obligations, restricts his subsequent connubial attentions to visiting her for the weekend once every month or so. He loathes these visits. His wife, a near-albino called Cressida, is scrupulously correct, laying out his slippers and whisky, but he senses that she is utterly indifferent to him and lives only for their daughter, Mary Rose.
Then a little girl is murdered in the woods behind the new council housing estate which is considered, by the ultraconservative refugees from the 20th century who constitute the bulk of the villagers, to be an atrocity in itself. Cressida immediately starts to manifest signs of incipient psychosis. She is persuaded that Mary Rose will be the putative maniac's next victim. Now on the night of the murder, Rowan was on one of his reluctant visits to the village and got so drunk in the Red Lion, his customary refuge from his travesty of a domestic life, that he can't remember how he spent the evening. Could he himself be the murderer? Did he slay the child as a substitute for eliminating his own despised daughter?
Miss Blackwood works hard to convince you that he did, crediting Rowan with dreams of pursuit by police dogs and eerie recognition of the ghastly details of the crime almost before they become public. She works rather too hard and before long the reader begins to suspect that he is being urged along a false trail. Then the author starts to seed the narrative with new hints. Cressida's morbid frenzy over the strange child's death suggests that she herself might have homicidal potential. The mounting tension in the village is skilfully conveyed but the reader finds himself increasingly manipulated.
I had almost mustered the resolve to breach the convention which maintains that a reviewer must never, never blurt out who, in fact, dunnit. I was fortified in the desperate enterprise by the conviction that the author had not displayed enough integrity, even within a thriller format, to merit my connivance in preserving the ultimate secret. But I have decided against it. The revelation would, indeed, be the only effective way of demonstrating that the author has failed to find a satisfactory solution to the literary problems that she has set for herself but it might also spoil the modest pleasure this flawed work will doubtless give some readers. So I will content myself with remarking that the ending is unsatisfactory at every level. Its amorphous denouement poses more, and more interesting, questions than the preceding text has answered. Thus the book has no real climax and this is a grave fault.
There are, however, some kind things to be said. Miss Blackwood does a persuasive job of male impersonation. I found Rowan Anderson almost totally convincing, even in his erotic responses, and male erotic reponses pose no mean challenge to a female author. Then again, the story has considerable drive. The characters, while unpleasant and a trifle underdeveloped, are plausible. The book is set securely in the contemporary world. Caroline Blackwood undoubtedly wields the pen of a natural and accomplished author. Soon, perhaps, she will give it work to do that is worthy of its potential.
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