a gallimaufry

Into Egypt, by Rosalind Brackenbury

Into Egypt is the third of Rosalind Brackenbury’s novels to be re-published by Walmer Books, and if you haven’t yet discovered her writing you are in for a treat. Her first novel, A Day to Remember to Forget, depicts a family coming together for a Sunday birthday lunch, evoked from different viewpoints. Her second, A Virtual Image, follows an Englishwoman driving through France in pursuit of her friend. Into Egypt, first published in 1973, centres around a young English girl who travels out to Israel in 1962 to ‘find herself’. It is written in the prose that I love, Brackenbury’s long, flowing sentences which are flexible enough to contain great subtlety and nuance, to chart shifts in characters’ thoughts and feelings with delicacy. The world that we perceive through those characters is described with careful, almost overwhelming detail; it is sensuous and heightened, as if we are experiencing everything in High Definition, and infused with the characters’ emotions. Here the main character, Jo, has been struggling with her unhappy boyfriend, Francis; the way that her view out of their London flat is described reveals the misery and the fleeting beauties of their relationship:

The chill settles upon me, the cold breath of a late May morning with no sun beyond the panes of glass. From our kitchen window we can see one tree in the small back garden of a house below our flat, one lilac tree with its white trumpet blooms dingy and its leaves matt with dust; and the smell of the lilac still rises to our window when we open it on fine nights, when we lean out and see the glow over the river, the sun setting on the pink chimneys of the power station, the clouds trawling the windy sky.

Into Egypt has two epigraphs. The first is from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’:

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Time is treated in a structurally complex way in the novel, which chops between Jo travelling in Israel in 1962, incidents in Jo’s childhood, Gilbert’s earlier life, Jo in London five years later, and Jo on a second trip to Israel in 1972. In terms of the novel, it means that sometimes we are experiencing events as they happen and sometimes we are looking back or already know something in advance. We learn early on, for example, that the young kibbutznik Gilbert, whom Jo meets on the boat out to Haifa and becomes close to, will be killed a few  years later, giving his plans for the future, the descriptions of his vigorous, strong body, a ghostlike quality.

(Students working in a kibbutz garden; found here)

Israel’s history marks the present wherever you look. Jo looks at the Mount of Olives, the Wailing Wall, Mount Zion, the past is everywhere visible and loaded with symbolism. The dreams of the kibbutzniks are based on the ancient idea of the Promised Land, the place where their ancestors lived. They have plans for the future but are rooted in what has come before. More recent history is just as prominent: the bullet holes in walls, the no-man’s land in Jerusalem. As the sun sets in Safad, Jo sees:

below there are the abandoned Arab houses set upon the slopes, that change from honey white and lose the light from their windows and turn blind black eyes down the valley, further still.

For Zvi Mosseri, the historian Jo meets in Jerusalem, the past is a trap, the old dreams need to be tempered and Israelis and Arabs must work together, overcome the fears and hatreds of the entrapping past. Clever, tormented Francis in London would agree: complaining about Freud, he says:

‘All this stuff about one’s childhood, when what one’s supposed to do nowadays is to face the existential reality of the present moment. [...] The present makes the past irrelevant. For the purposes of therapy, anyway. Don’t you see that using the past as the only explanation of the present denies any play of free will?’

And so, perhaps, the gaps in the narrative and the shifts back and forth in time force us to focus on the moment being told to us.

(Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, 1962; from here)

The second epigraph is from Exodus:

Fear not to go into Egypt.

You can see into Egypt from the kibbutz at Gan Hagar, on the border ‘the huts and the United Nations men playing cards, and the guns laid in readiness against the wooden walls, and the flags marking the boundary line’. Gilbert tells Jo:

‘It’s the same earth, you know. Same land, same farmers. Only we can never go into Egypt, and they can never come over to us.’

Where you work the land, you belong, in Gilbert’s mind. Visiting London, he is lost in its ‘insubstantial charade’. The only English person he considers ‘real’ is a cowherd he meets out in the countryside: ‘It was true: work was the universal reality.’ This clear vision, this kibbutz life of hard work which totally absorbs you, appeals to Jo too. There is a part of her that craves certainty and hopes that Israel will provide exactly that:

And I stand apart, I listen, I judge, I am looking for right and wrong, black and white, the absolutes which I must have come here to find.

It is the same part that, years later, drives her to visit her boyfriend’s therapist for an ‘explanation’ of what has happened to him. Yet she also suspects these certainties. One of her childhood memories is of arranging her crayons in order of the colours of the spectrum:

but when the arrangement is finished there are two pencils left, the white and the black [...] To put one at each end seems to mock the gradations of subtle colour within, for they are too extreme, too absolute; they are not a part of the rainbow but something exterior and hard to place; perhaps they are not even colours. To avoid the decision she puts them separately in her satchel.

For this reason, she is also attracted to the ambiguities and complexities Zvi offers her. Moderation makes sense to her, though it is more difficult than black-and-white.

Exodus is about a journey; Into Egypt is full of journeys, interior and exterior. In the end, there are no answers and no final destinations, the point is to fear not to go into Egypt, to take the risk and keep moving.

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

When it comes to creepy fiction, my needs are quite specific. I am incredibly weedy, I once had nightmares after watching an episode of Midsomer Murders which is about as feeble as you can get without actually turning into a flower, so my tolerance of ick and gore is non-existent. Edgar Allan Poe really is my limit. Yet I do enjoy a good ghost story, a sinister old house on a hill, shadows lengthening by the fireside. Scary but not too scary because, as well as hating ick, I am quickly repelled by anything too cruel or too evil, even E. Nesbit can go too far for my tastes, I need a happy ending.

Recently, I have bravely read Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings which I enjoyed but in a tense sort of way. Robert Aickmann’s Dark Secrets was also very good and although the first story was truly horrifying, the rest of the collection was unsettling in a delightfully spooky but not upsetting way. Emboldened, when I saw a new copy of Mexican Gothic in the English-language section of my local library, I borrowed it. The reviews on its front pages compared it to Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Dracula and The Mysteries of Udolpho, which appealed. (Though I may say here I thought the reference to Jane Eyre rather a stretch.) I initially also thought of House of Mist by María-Luísa Bombal, but although there is a lonely house wreathed in mist, a young wife, strangeness and atmosphere, they are not really alike at all.

Noemí Taboada is a light-hearted, slightly spoilt debutante, enjoying the social whirl of Mexico City in 1950. Her beloved cousin Catalina has married, somewhat against the family’s wishes, an impoverished Englishman who lives in an isolated old house deep in the mountains, and now sends a wild and desperate letter to Noemí’s father. Should she be receiving proper psychiatric care rather than being nursed by the Doyle family in the middle of nowhere? Noemí’s father sends her to find out. But of course, it is all much worse than she could have imagined!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has taken lots of Gothic tropes and had a great deal of fun with them. There is a rotting mansion, wreathed in mists and beside an old graveyard. There is a nasty aristocratic family, haunted by the murders of their relatives some thirty years ago and obsessed with ideas of racial superiority (naturally theirs is the superior race, non-whites the inferior ones). There are strange dreams that may be true, a mysterious sickness, disused silver mines and a lot of fungus. There is creeping about the house at night. To these she adds a twist of feminism as Noemí proves herself, despite her high heels and taffeta skirts, to have the right blend of courage, rebelliousness, intelligence and love to expose the house’s horrible secrets.

In the end it is horrifying and I hope that I can sleep well tonight… What I like about it though is that the horror is used to tell us something about racism, class systems and yes, the patriarchy. And the novel is beautifully structured and paced, the characters well drawn, the atmosphere properly creepy. But I shan’t tell you any more because I don’t want to spoil it...

(The only remaining mystery to me is why the paperback edition that I read has a very bland outer cover that reflects very little of the novel and then a brilliant inner cover, which is the one at the beginning of this post.)

What are your feelings about creepy fiction? And what is the most frightening novel you have read?