skygiants | (no subject)

When

osprey_archer came to visit a few months ago, she left behind a bounty of previously-unknown-to-me Audrey Erskine Lindop books; I read the one that she said was most disappointing first, and saved the second until I was casting about for good covid reading and

osprey_archer suggested that a particularly off-the-wall Lindop might be just the thing! AND INDEED.

The Self-Appointed Saint begins when middle-aged lawyer Jock Quale is hired to preside over the divorce of his best friend, whose much-younger wife Patti he has never met. The best friend explains that he is terribly fond of Patti, but she is constantly causing accidents through her kind-heartedness, and has a habit of sleeping with people altruistically in order to make them feel better, and he bears no grudges but it's starting to get a bit wearying and he thinks he might like to marry someone a bit more restful before he also accidentally kicks the bucket.

"By the way," I asked, "what happened to her first husband?"
"She killed him."
"What?
"Well, it was a wasp really. His name was Vinner.
"The wasp?"
"No, the husband, Eric or Charlie, I can't remember. He was an assistant manager in one of my supermarkets. When he died I married Patti."
"He was allergic to wasp stings?" I enquired politely.
"No. But Patti's terribly kind, you see."
To my shame I didn't see, so I fell back on, "I beg your pardon?"
"There was a wasp in their car. He told her to kill it but she hadn't the heart and it stung him in the eye before he could let it out of the window. He drove into a wall. She only broke a collar bone. But he died."

Meanwhile, Jock's wife Sylvia becomes convinced on the basis of the handwriting on a thank-you card that Patti is in fact secretly Anne-Marie, an unhappy & unlucky kid known for her off-putting looks and constant lies who briefly lived with Jock and Sylvia before running away and disappearing forever. Patti is extremely beautiful and popular and Anne-Marie was socially maladroit and extremely ugly, but this does not shake Sylvia's conviction in the least; nor does meeting Patti when she finally appears. In short order, Sylvia ends up in a sanatorium, where she repeatedly says that she's not upset, she just wishes Patti would stop playing this silly game and admit that she's Anne-Marie already.

PATTI: well now I have accidentally caused all this trouble I guess I have no choice but to move in and take over Sylvia's life while we figure out how to help her D:
JOCK: hm. well, I actually hate my kids and you seem great with them so I guess I won't argue
PATTI: also of course we will sleep together. I won't enjoy it particularly but it seems the least I can do D:
JOCK: you don't have to ---
PATTI: no, I'm gonna
JOCK: well now we have slept together I am even surer she is not Anne-Marie because it is simply not possible I would ever sleep with anyone who had ever been so ugly

Finally, Jock decides to go collect reminiscences from the nuns at the Catholic school where Anne-Marie and Sylvia met to see if he can find anything that will definitively prove that Patti is not Anne-Marie.

... of course Patti is absolutely Anne-Marie, a pathologically generous child who is constantly being blamed for serious accidents caused by her attempts to make people feel better. My absolute favorite Anne-Marie Crime is when she lies and tells her grandmother that the grandmother's mean landlord said something nice about her outfit, which means that the grandmother feels grimly obliged to be pleasant to the landlord next time she sees him, which means they start hanging out socially, which makes them BOTH so frustrated that they go into cardiac arrest and die. A double murder!

Sylvia, a cool older student turned convent school teacher, is one of the only people who is kind to Anne-Marie, so when Jock is wooing her he decides that Being Kind to Anne-Marie is the best way to Sylvia's heart. He is right! Unfortunately for Jock, Sylvia then wants to adopt Anne-Marie, when Jock secretly finds Anne-Marie deeply off-putting. Distraught that her presence is tearing this (bad) marriage apart, Anne-Marie runs away and runs into ... a FRIENDLY GANGSTER with a TERMINAL ILLNESS who is looking for a good cause to spend his money on before he dies!

Having once been notably ugly himself and undergone plastic surgery to escape the attention of the police, he decides that he will spend his declining years giving Little Orphan Anne-Marie all the affection, fancy clothes, and plastic surgery that her little heart desires. Anne-Marie is transformed into beautiful Patti and puts her Anne-Marie days behind her, until Sylvia rumbles her.

Eventually, Patti decides that despite her reluctance to accept her Dark Anne-Marie past she cannot leave Sylvia in the sanatorium either, and confesses her true identity to Jock and Sylvia. Jock refuses to believe it absolutely. Sylvia ...

[Sylvia] said, "Well, dear, you do look very pretty now, so I suppose we ought to be grateful to him, but I always thought you looked nice as you were."

Sylvia bounces out of the sanatorium, bearing no grudges about the whole affair whatsoever; Jock, on the other hand, is so incapable of coping with the realization that he Slept With Off-Putting Anne-Marie that he promptly ends up in the sanatorium instead. Nobody misses him! THE END.

The various deaths, for the record, do appear to all have been complete accidents spilling over from Anne-Marie's Kindness Jinx.

As Lindops go, it cannot stand up to The Way to the Lantern or The Singer Not the Song, which are books I actually like, but as a wild covid-recovery reading experience it was indeed an incredible choice.

(For the record, the first, disappointing book was Journey Into Stone, about a cop's bad marriage dissolving while he investigates a serial killer situation.)

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My absolute favorite Anne-Marie Crime is when she lies and tells her grandmother that the grandmother's mean landlord said something nice about her outfit, which means that the grandmother feels grimly obliged to be pleasant to the landlord next time she sees him, which means they start hanging out socially, which makes them BOTH so frustrated that they go into cardiac arrest and die.

I would like you and the ghost of Audrey Erskine Lindop to know that I have probably not laughed out loud in days, but this sentence did it.

Ahahaha YES this is truly the perfect recovering-from-illness book, because it is SO off the wall.

The girl who KILLS PEOPLE with her well-meant WHITE LIES. (I'm so baffled by this on, like, a thematic level. The discrepancy between Anne-Marie's little white lies and the consequence, DEATH, is so huge that it feels bizarrely like an 18th century didactic story for children, except what's the lesson Lindop wants us to take from it?)

SYLVIA who I really expected to be angrier about the fact that Anne-Marie (a) slept with Sylvia's husband, and (b) lied about her identity for months even though that meant everyone believed Sylvia was suffering from delusions. I could get over (a) on the grounds that maybe Sylvia is glad to have an excuse to divorce him, but (b)?

The GANGSTER who PAYS FOR ANNE-MARIE'S PLASTIC SURGERY. (Did you catch the part where Anne-Marie mentions that she fell in love with him, but he would never sleep with her? Yet ANOTHER instance of a classic Lindop "teen girl with a crush on an inaccessible older man.")

Also would like to note that in this one instance, the teen girl grew up and attained one of her unattainable older men (after undergoing extensive plastic surgery so he couldn't recognize her) and it was so not worth it.

IT'S HER BIRTHDAY. "Audrey Erskine Lindop (26 December 1920, London – 7 November 1986, Isle of Wight)..."

Also, I still want to know if she was related to Grevel Lindop.

... what.

I used to shelve children's and YA books in the spare bedroom, figuring that anyone who needed to read themselves to sleep would find Pooh suitable, and then I switched all the hardcover SF and fantasy in there, and now I'm thinking I need to put a few shelves of the Crack That Will Not Let You Sleep, with as much Audrey Erskine Lindop as I can find.

That is completely bonkers.

I guess this is a happy ending, as now Sylvia and Patti can live together as they originally wished!

This is truly the absolute best compliment & reason for doing writeups that you could give me (and the ghost of Audrey Erskine Lindop) <333333

I think we are meant to thematically understand Anne-Marie as a reflection upon/judgment of the hypocrisy of society -- she gets blamed for telling exactly the same kind of lies that all the adults around her also tell, she just doesn't understand the rules for how/when to tell them so she becomes scapegoated for it (and indeed Awful Jock's downfall is through a classic Anne-Marie Helpful Hypocrisy in lying to Sylvia about how much he likes Anne-Marie!) -- but then whence all the deaths! Is she also just unrelatedly cursed??

Perhaps Sylvia was the true self-appointed saint all along .... she really does seem desperate to throw herself virtuously on the Pyre of Anne-Marie, presumably as expiation for the death of the priest.

I have to admit that I am somewhat glad that Lindop has finally followed "teen girl with a crush on inaccessible older man" to its logical conclusion, "and then I finally got him and it was simply the worst, and he was an enormous asshole, and I also had to worry all the time about accidentally giving him a heart attack." I thought she probably did not at all want all those teen girls to get their unattainable men but it's nice to have it confirmed!

omg! HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUDREY. Thrilled to have been able to honor her this year!

This appears to have been her last book and she seems to have concentrated all her considerable powers of "???!?????" into it.

PLEASE. I need company on my Lindop Quest!

I didn't even mention the side plot about her strict teacher at the convent, whom it turned out was accidentally funding orgies.

I have completely forgotten this orgy subplot! Truly you know a book has off the charts levels of bonkers if you can forget an orgy subplot.

Yes, whence the deaths! Most people manage to tell hypocritical white lies without leaving a trail of bodies behind, even if we, like Anne-Marie, sometimes muck up the timing of said white lies...

Do you think Lindop stopped writing because she had finally brought the "teen girl with a crush on an inaccessible older man" plot to its logical conclusion? "Finally got that out of my system, now I can turn my creative attention to croquet," she said, briskly dusting off her hands.

It is also extremely funny how much time Patti spends fretting about Jock's potential heart attack from all the athletic sex they're having. At long last she gets to bang her Inaccessible Older Man, AND she gets to make him feel old and decrepit in the guise of being concerned about him.

Okay, now you have to elaborate!

It's true! Nobody needed Jock nor wanted him! One does have some concerns about Sylvia and Patti's mutual tendencies towards self-immolation in the service of a perceived greater good, but I suppose that's their own problem to sort out.

The strict teacher has a younger Crime Boyfriend whose Soul she is hoping to Save, who is of course actually just sponging off her for money -- all fairly usual as far as it goes, until we get to the list of his Crimes (above and beyond trying to rob the convent). "He and his friends strummed guitars outside of public lavatories and sometimes they dressed as Buddhist monks and went down Oxford Street with begging-bowls [...] The young man was President of a multiple sex society or something - and there were orgies, some of which must have been financed by her. She gave him a horrifying amount of money." Then they describe his outfit: "Did you see the coat he was wearing when he was arrested?" "It looked like a lot of dead water-rats slung together, and by the way, what had he got on his head?"

The Mother Superior and priest having this discussion conclude by agreeing that if their staff are going to be so desperate as to fall in love with such a fellow, they really ought to change the rules and allow them to entertain guests in their room normally in hopes that it will encourage them to date normally instead of funding secret orgies.

It does rather seem that way, doesn't it! Finally, the culmination of her career -- proof that the older man was simply not worth obsessing over. (Although of course the one who is worth obsessing over, Cyril the kindly gangster, refuses point-blank to sleep with her, so perhaps she thinks they're only worth obsessing over if they remain virtuously unobtainable?)

It's SO funny and he's SO distraught about it. She's so upfront, too! "Let me be clear. I don't enjoy the sex and I also think it's objectively mediocre, because I have been taking care to ensure it's not too good lest you expire. These are the most explicit pity fucks that have ever occurred. Also I'm giving them up for Lent."

It was also extremely funny that Jock doesn't appear to fully take in the fact that he's a pity fuck. She spells it out to him extremely clearly and he just doesn't seem to entirely grasp it!

Wow. Just, wow. Thank you for explaining.