Some gothic screams in the night
Beryl Bainbridge
The spirits roam wildly through peaceful Lancashire in the English country side. Two girls home for summer vacation are invaded and possessed. Our narrator is 13; her close friend Harriet is one year older. Beryl Bainbridge pursues these youngsters in her macabré novel Harriet Said (Braziller, $5.95), illuminating some of the darkest, deepest, most obscure corners of human motivation and behavior. This carefully architected Bainbridge tale echoes both the trials of Lolita and the tribulations falling to some of Miss Jean Brodie's boarding school girls. Ghostly interiors come alive.
Psychologists will have a circus with Harriet and her friend. Here is a frightful tale about a suppressed lesbian relationship; or maybe the focus is simply on case studies of adolescent hysteria. The mythical journey from innocence to ex-
By Abe C. Ravitz
perience hits a detour in the development of these driven girls. Oedipus runs amok. The devil is his sidekick. Fear and terror abound. There are gothic screams in the night. Death is inevitable. Each new experience must be more intricate and complex.
The Man's name is Mr. Biggs, but Harriet and companion always refer to him as the Tsar. Quite undistinguished, this middle-aged gentleman, sallow complexion and all, exudes a sinister, Byronic aura. Life, his body language appears to say, has relegated him to an unfortunate nightmare existence. His large, coarse wife must be an object of ridicule. She is a selfish harridan, so the girls maintain. The Tsar needs love and, certainly, understanding. He's lonely.
From comedy to mischief to horror this tale moves. Harriet is a great one for
stirring up trouble She is insolent and inventive; she bosses and she lies. Her influence on the narrator is hypnotic.
A bizarre, weird relationship be tween vacationing girls and the unhappy Tsar evolves. Walks in the woods, accidental imprisonment in the local church, peeping through the windows, sex and, finally murder. Fate will prevail in all its cruelty. So will Harriet, the return of the bad seed.
The sensuality and violence were suggested by a case of some 20 years ago when two New Zealand girls played "saints" in love and made a chilling plan -eventually successful-for murder. Author Beryl Bainbridge proceeds to shatter the myth of sweet childhood, and in profaning innocence she examines a decadent world of hallucination colored by fantasy and supercharged with guilt.
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