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Forged Selves
| Article
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19049 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,598 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
DEATH'S DARKEST FACE
Julian Symons
New York: Viking, 1990
272 pp., $17.95
Can a novel be too good--too good at least for its class? After reading a quarter of Julian Symons' latest mystery novel. I realized I did not especially care about the solution to the riddle of the disappearance of a minor poet in the summer of 1936. What was of compelling interest was the character of the investigator and what his search revealed about a world long faded and the new world that has largely replaced it.
Death's Darkest Face does not fail as a mystery story: Transcending the formulas of its subgenre, it succeeds as a novel exploring serious themes of our need to understand the past, a past that remains elusive as well as instructive because of the masks and roles people constructed to face the world. Symons is one of England's most distinguished practitioners of the craft of mystery fiction; a writer of more than two dozen novels dating back to 1945, he holds numerous awards for his mastery of the tale of distention. In this novel--written with grace, care, and seriousness--he uses the conventions of the form he has mastered to meditate on mysteries of other selves and other times and the danger, the value, and the pain of trying to know the truth of them. This is not a book to be typed as simply mystery fiction, as if its attraction lay chiefly in solving a (usually violent) puzzle. It is a mystery story, and a good one in the limited generic sense, but it is more--a sometimes somber, sometimes funny, probing of the complexities of other people in other times.
In a way reminiscent of Victorian tales of the mysterious and the ghostly, Death's Darkest Face is elaborately framed. After Geoffrey Elder's death in 1979, Julian Symons (appearing as a mystery writer in his book) receives Elder's manuscript account of his 1960s investigation into the events surrounding the disappearance of poet Hugo Headley during the summer of 1936. The story that follows purports to be Elder's account of his amateur detective work undertaken to clear his dead father's name of some ugly implications unearthed by a biographer. This biographer revealed letters suggesting that Headley may have been blackmailing Harold elder, Geoffrey's emotionally distant and strict father.
Symons claims to have trimmed extraneous autobiographical material and juxtaposed sections of the narrative only to contrast the sixties with the thirties.
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