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A review by slippy_underfoot
The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood
5.0
Historian Rowan Anderson is a craven, self-centred, man with no discernible affinity for the women is his life. He lives apart from his strange, inert, wife Cressida and their frail, pallid, daughter Mary Rose.
For appearance’s sake he visits them in their country cottage every few weeks, where an icy formality reigns, and Mary Rose regards him with a mute apathy.
When a local child is raped and murdered Cressida’s oddness evolves into an obsessive mania of fear and wrath. She’s despairingly exalted by this opportunity to demonstrate the danger of the world, and the men who fill it, to her daughter.
As Cressida’s behaviours become more erratic, the congenitally unwilling Rowan is put under pressure to actually DO something about it. As what he liked best about his family was that he didn’t really need to involve himself with it, he initially finds this beyond his capabilities and interest, a position which quickly becomes untenable.
Like John Fowles’ The Collector the book puts us inside the head of a truly appalling human being, a man who can only find interest in his own purposes. Everyone else is a peg upon which to hang bits of his life.
Rowan has zero empathy, but intellectually can recognise remarkable women. The book he is trying to write about Hertha Ayrton (look her up, she rocks) and her incredible achievements is failing because he can document facts, but he can’t imbue his text with any sense of “the woman”. I thought this was a great character touch.
Cressida is monstrous in an entirely captivating way. We can’t look away, and we long to know what happened to her to make her this way. We know what makes Rowan such a shit: privilege.
The book is a bleak farce, reflecting the frictions between the classes, the sexes, and the rural and the urban. It has the traditional structure - a character trying to keep plates spinning in the face of endless disturbance and disruption, reaching fever pitch - but there are few laughs here. There is wit, but the horror is intense, delivered with fast jabbing gut-punches.
Extraordinary.
For appearance’s sake he visits them in their country cottage every few weeks, where an icy formality reigns, and Mary Rose regards him with a mute apathy.
When a local child is raped and murdered Cressida’s oddness evolves into an obsessive mania of fear and wrath. She’s despairingly exalted by this opportunity to demonstrate the danger of the world, and the men who fill it, to her daughter.
As Cressida’s behaviours become more erratic, the congenitally unwilling Rowan is put under pressure to actually DO something about it. As what he liked best about his family was that he didn’t really need to involve himself with it, he initially finds this beyond his capabilities and interest, a position which quickly becomes untenable.
Like John Fowles’ The Collector the book puts us inside the head of a truly appalling human being, a man who can only find interest in his own purposes. Everyone else is a peg upon which to hang bits of his life.
Rowan has zero empathy, but intellectually can recognise remarkable women. The book he is trying to write about Hertha Ayrton (look her up, she rocks) and her incredible achievements is failing because he can document facts, but he can’t imbue his text with any sense of “the woman”. I thought this was a great character touch.
Cressida is monstrous in an entirely captivating way. We can’t look away, and we long to know what happened to her to make her this way. We know what makes Rowan such a shit: privilege.
The book is a bleak farce, reflecting the frictions between the classes, the sexes, and the rural and the urban. It has the traditional structure - a character trying to keep plates spinning in the face of endless disturbance and disruption, reaching fever pitch - but there are few laughs here. There is wit, but the horror is intense, delivered with fast jabbing gut-punches.
Extraordinary.