I
suppose it's not
unusual for the American publishing industry to ignore
a talented writer, particularly when the writer has
never been published before. The uncertainties inherent
in taking on an unpublished writer—are their
works marketable? will they be the critic's darling
and the public's No Name?—more than compensate
for the moment's joy felt when discovering a real
talent. But it's another matter altogether when the
neglected writer has actually been published to much
acclaim for decades in another English-speaking country—and
in a genre that's immensely popular in America, at
that. Indeed, it's one
of the publishing industry's odd mysteries that
Patricia Carlon's superb psychological thrillers
had to wait more than thirty years to be published
in America. She has been compared—justifiably—to
such masters of the genre as Alfred Hitchcock and
Patricia Highsmith, and yet despite her having written
more than fifty novels and being translated into
seven languages, until Soho Press began publishing
her work four years ago, she was entirely unknown
to most Americans.
And it's hard to understand why,
frankly. While her novels are set in her native
Australia, they aren't overwhelmed by a sense of
foreignness that closes them against American readers.
She doesn't use impenetrable slang, for example,
and her setting descriptions are more than adequate
to bring a distant landscape to life. In fact, her
storylines are not tied to her settings; they could
easily be changed to American ones and the stories
would lose only a sense of local color (wake up,
Hollywood!). And even more importantly, Carlon uses
plot devices that are familiar to any American reader
who has seen her share of Hitchcock films.
This is especially obvious in
Soho Press's latest Carlon title, The Unquiet
Night.
The
Unquiet Night (which Carlon wrote in 1965) opens—like
Hitchcock's Rope—with a tight shot
on a strangling victim. Mart, a nineteen-year-old
man with a troubled past, has snapped suddenly under
the weight of his date's ridicule when she discovers
that he only wants to talk—and talk and talk.
She had said at first, "Well,
you're a queer one, aren't you?" and tried
to break across his talk, but he hadn't let her
and after a while the red mouth had turned down.
She had even started to hum, to sing half under
her breath, the drone of it hiding the words,
annoying him.
When he had told her to be quiet
and listen she had retorted flatly, "Who
says I got to? I didn't come to sit and freeze
and listen to you. You're silly anyway."
He'd been angry then, and she'd
grown angry in turn. She had called him silly
again and told him he ought to be locked up and
blind fury had taken over his actions. He'd wanted
only to shut out the words: to stop the taunting,
when he had caught her by her slim throat.
Of course, he regrets his action
immediately, but it's too late. Now, it seems, he
has a body to get rid of. So he drags the girl's
body to the edge of a lake and rolls it into the
water. After watching it disappear, he turns back
to the woods and begins retracing his steps to his
motor scooter. "Then," Carlon writes,
"he saw them." A nine-year-old girl and
her aunt have come to the reserve for a picnic,
and while the girl is caught up in her playing,
the woman is staring directly at Mart. After whispering
Hello, he flees. But once he has a moment
to reflect, he realizes that the woman will be able
to identify him, once the girl's body is found and
questions are asked. Unless, he tells himself
as he begins a night-long hunt for the witness,
she isn't able to talk.
Mart doesn't begin to approach
Patricia Highsmith's brilliant psychopath, Tom Ripley,
either in psychological complexity or perverse appeal.
While Ripley ripples with a jealousy that finds
its best expression in irony and mordant humor,
Mart is defined mostly by rage and anger. And given
his youth and lack of physical appeal, he's not
to be found among Hitchcock's stable of villains
either. Carlon does sketch out the other characters
in The Unquiet Night surprisingly well given
the book's speed and relative brevity, and we find
ourselves caring quite a bit for people with whom
we've suddenly been thrown without much preamble.
But the real star here is Carlon's
skill at weaving an intricate plot around a single
plot device: she gives her readers more information
than any single character has in any given scene
(or ultimately, in the novel as a whole), and then
she sets up a series of coincidences and near misses
to drive us crazy with anticipation. An example:
a repairman gets worried when he sees his client
hasn't taken in her milk delivery—so he takes
it in for her...but doesn't hear her frantic (though
muffled) cries for help. Then her boyfriend appears
and becomes alarmed when he sees she hasn't fed
her dog, and he starts to investigate...but then
he notices she's taken the milk in, and he decides
she's merely gone back to sleep. And then he leaves
without hearing her (still frantic but fading) cries
for help.
Again and again, Carlon brings
her characters to the brink of figuring out the
mystery or saving someone's life, but they lack
that one critical piece of information that we ourselves
have, and so we're hurtled into the next character's
near miss. The wonder of it all, of course, is that
Carlon can use such a simple device in so many different
ways without our growing weary of it. Indeed, the
tension toward the novel's end is almost unbearable;
like Hitchcock, she isn't unwilling to cause her
characters pain in the name of suspense. Yes, it's
sadistic to enjoy watching a novelist torture her
characters at such length, but I dare you to read
160 pages of The Unquiet Night and set it
down with the final thirty left unread.
This is, quite simply, about as
good as the genre gets.
The
Price of an Orphan, which Soho Press has now
released in paperback after last year's hardcover
American debut (thirty-five years after Carlon wrote
it), is almost exactly the same length as The
Unquiet Night, but it moves at a decidedly more
leisurely pace that makes it feel longer and a bit
more substantive—at some expense to that breathless
quality you expect in a thriller, of course. Ironically,
the two novels share a jarring detail: they both
have nine-year-old children at their center. But
The Price of an Orphan's nine year old does
indeed witness his book's murder, and he can actually
fight back against the murderer should they try
to silence him—but only if he can get someone
to listen to him.
Johnnie has been taken in by a
young, childless couple as a foster child, but it's
turned out to be a mismatched pairing. While the
Stuarts live on a farm in the outback, Johnnie prefers
the city, and their disagreements and misunderstandings
escalate as Johnnie begins to tell elaborate lies
as a way of rebelling. Inevitably, when he tries
to tell the Stuarts about the woman in the bright
red dress being murdered near the farm's series
of caves, nobody believes him—no matter how
many believable details he offers. (Unfortunately,
he's missing the most crucial detail—the murderer's
identity; he'd seen the murderer from a distance
and can only identify their clothes.) Then, when
the murderer offers to drive Johnnie back to his
father in the city by a roundabout tour through
the outback, Johnnie's hopes (and ours) seem dashed.
The tension builds appreciably at this point, of
course, and Carlon plays up particularly well the
deliciously frustrating problem of being a small,
seemingly helpless child trying to outsmart a tough
adult who has successfully cut you off from everyone
else and is devilishly talented at explaining away
your rare chances to shout murderer.
Carlon invests more time in building
up the psychological complexities of The Price
of an Orphan's central characters than she does
in The Unquiet Night, which makes critics
in search of substantive themes happy and has the
added benefit of making the book feel significant
to readers who want their books to be more than
guilty pleasures. The caves, for instance, might
bring the Marabar Caves to mind among readers who
know their E.M. Forster. Like A Passage to India's
famous caves, Carlon's have strong metaphorical
implications: diminishing the individual's significance
in the face of nature's grand, subtly dangerous
show on the one hand and on the other symbolizing
the dangerous pitfalls that lie before anyone exploring
their repressed subconscious. (The Stuarts, after
all, have no children of their own; in time, they
don't even sleep close enough to touch in bed, which
hints at far darker repressions.)
But for all that, The Price
of an Orphan remains, at heart, simply a stunningly
strong piece of suspenseful writing. Indeed, the
final pages of The Price of an Orphan are
brilliantly managed, with enough tension to make
readers crush a drinking glass in their fist, even
though all the tension hinges on implied action;
in reality, everyone is caught up in that dead-silent
tension Hitchcock uses so well when suspicion on
one side and the unsatisfied desire to scream on
the other render characters mute. (The final scene
in Hitchcock's Notorious comes most readily
to mind here, but these final pages often feel shockingly
close to the used car dealership scene in Hitchcock's
Psycho.) The Unquiet Night may be
a better novel of suspense overall, if only because
its plot is so taut and the tension so beautifully
maintained. But The Price of an Orphan works
through another rhythm altogether, and its accumulated
suspense, handled so masterfully in the finale,
is riveting.
Happily, Soho Press hasn't finished
with Carlon—they will next publish her Hush,
It's a Game (one of Carlon's more promising
titles) and expect to publish at least two more—and
they merit accolades for bringing this superb writer's
mysteries to Americans. Hopefully, she'll finally
get the attention she deserves. |