skygiants

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.

( spoilers )

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.)

People who follow me on Twitter may remember that when I was a few chapters away from the thrilling conclusion of The Singer Not the Song, I temporarily lost my copy of the book and went into a full-blown tailspin about it.

As you know, the book eventually turned up safe and sound, but it turned out in the end to be a blessing because without that panic, I never would have gone to look up local libraries in the faint hope that they might have acquired some more Audrey Erskine Lindop since my first time searching several years ago -- and in fact they had! Specifically, they had acquired Sight Unseen (1969), the back copy of which reads:

Everybody wanted to play Brian Touhey's life for him:

His fiancee wanted him to stay sober and paint "sober" pictures.

His fiancee's mother wanted him to find another fiancee.

His "Beau Brummel" cousin wanted him to be a successful businessman.

His cat, Dogberry, wanted him to give up women completely and serve fresh fish more often.

But none of them worked quite as hard for what they wanted as Colonel Hawkins. And he wanted to lock Bryan away in a gloomy old house on Romney Marsh -- where Bryan could drink and paint; where he could put down on canvas the phantasmagoria of his alcohol soaked brain; where he could die...

For the record, I remember clearly that I acquired this book the day before St. Patrick's Day, because I went to chorus practice and forced sovay to look at the back cover, and then went to a St. Patrick's Day party and forced everybody there to look at the back cover as well because it delighted me so much.

Based on this cover and the experience of The Singer Not the Song, I felt it was not unreasonable for me to expect this book to be an extremely homoerotic boy-meets-house Gothic. Which it ... sort of is? And I want to be clear: it's not quite as gay as The Singer Not the Song (but then, what could be.) The emotional dynamic is more like a version of the main triangle in Gilda with Gilda and Johnnie's roles reversed: an older man becomes obsessed with a younger man, and sets him up with a young woman who's obsessed with him (the older man) in a situation where they can't help but also become a little obsessed with each other, and it's all going to resolve in either threesome or murder.

The plot:

Brian is a fairly terrible young man who owns a failing antiques shop, which he lies and says is haunted to see if it will turn out in an uptick in sales. (It doesn't.) He also paints intense, creepy paintings, but only when he's drunk. He also has a semi-hemi-demi fiancee whom everyone including the reader is clearly meant to find a bit boring, so it's a pity that approximately the first half of the book involves a lot of will-they-won't-they about their clearly doomed relationship. (The fiancee's mother, on the other hand, who hates Brian with the passion of a thousand suns, is absolutely great and I'm so sad she disappears from the book.)

Anyway, Colonel Hawkins comes across Brian's art and promptly decides that he can make Brian's Extremely Valuable, possibly by spreading rumors that he's possessed by a painting ghost. Or maybe Brian is possessed by a painting ghost!

As in any good Gothic, Brian is immediately suspicious of Hawkins but also compelled by him:

It occurred to me that it was only when I was out of Hawkins' company that I thought him so sinister. When I was with him I felt stimulated and oddly soothed by that cool voice.

Colonel Hawkins, by the way, also has a tragic backstory involving the imaginary painting ghost:

"Who was 'Darling, darling Laura'?" I asked.

"The only person I have ever met whose work bore the smallest resemblance to yours."

"Oh, she painted?"

"He did."

There the conversation ended as Hawkins had no obvious intention of continuing it.

Hawkins, by the way, himself paints technically well enough to arouse Brian's deep envy, but despises his own work:

BRIAN: "If you can touch me up, why don't you paint like that yourself?"
HAWKINS: "Because I can only touch you up and not paint like that myself unless I copy you."

Along the way Brian is adopted by a stray cat, which promptly becomes the most important relationship in his life, and also a means by which Hawkins can further exert control: Brian has accidentally tripped over Dogberry the cat and now Dogberry is mad at him! HAWKINS, CAT WHISPERER, IS THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN HELP HIM COAX DOGBERRY TO EAT. I suspect I am not the only one who find this a pleasant piece of thematic repetition in Lindop's work.

Inevitably, Colonel Hawkins decides that Brian's fiancee is a Bad Influence on his work and sends him off to stay ( in his sinister mansion! spoilers through the end )

I picked up Audrey Erskine Lindop's 1961 novel The Way to the Lantern at the Traveler Restaurant (the Connecticut diner that stocks books to give away) a few months back, solely based on the fact that it had a bright red cover with the words "A NOVEL OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION" emblazoned on it. Last week I finally started reading it.

By the time I got five pages in, the protagonist, a prisoner sentenced to death by the Revolution, had already:

- complained about the fact that everyone else slated for execution is being annoyingly noble and nonchalant about it
- complained vociferously about the fact that he’s slated to be executed under the wrong name
- been required to prove his identity by flashing his uniquely-scarred ass at the Tribunal (one cheek was bitten by a dog and has never recovered)
- protested to the Tribunal - who think he is a Viscomte in hiding, and do not believe that he is a real actor because the secret policeman who saw him on stage officially reported back that he was unbelievably bad - that he IS a real actor, he’s actually a GREAT actor, he was just TIRED that day
- managed to stave off execution due to the fact, in addition to the committee that wants to execute him for being a Viscomte in hiding, there’s ANOTHER committee that wants to execute him for being a spying Englishman and they cannot agree on who's right

At this point I almost stopped reading because this was already basically a perfect book and things could only go downhill from here.

The Way to the Lantern is essentially a reverse Scarlet Pimpernel: instead of being a brilliant mastermind with twelve identities which are never connected by the Revolutionary authorities, Our Hero is a completely irrelevant actor named Roberts who, through a series of poor decisions and unlucky catastrophes, accidentally has the Revolutionary authorities convinced that he is a brilliant mastermind with twelve identities.

( Further detailed plot spoilers below explain how this came about )

Anyway I am now obviously planning to seek out everything else Audrey Erskine Lindop has ever written, so LOOK FORWARD TO MORE OF THAT.