Books: The Beacon

Published on 10/10/2008 14:00

"THERE IS A CUPBOARD BEN- eath the stairs at the Beacon ... I do not remember when I was first put in the cupboard but I cannot have been more than a toddler, a little boy of barely two, and I know that it was not part of some childish game. It was my father, John Prime, that huge man with the raw red hands, who put me in there, for some babyish misbehaviour, and dropped the latch."

The Beacon

by Susan Hill

Chatto & Windus, 160pp, 10

Review by ALLAN MASSIE

The tone is familiar, caught exactly. It is that of the misery memoir, the account of a deprived or abused childhood. Such books often sell well, and indeed there has been a spate of them in recent years. No doubt, if they are true, products of accurate memory, they serve as therapy of some sort for the author. But perhaps they are not always true, for memory, and brooding on memory, may distort. Either way, they are an act of revenge, and intended to wound. Among those who suffer are other members of the author's family, innocent, indeed often ignorant, of the abuse, if abuse there was. The misery memoir often inflicts misery in its turn.

This is the theme of Susan Hill's novella. There are four children – Colin, May, Frank and Berenice – who grow up on a farm somewhere in the north of England. May is the clever one; she is at the centre of the story. She wins a scholarship to the grammar school and another to London University. Then she has a form of nervous breakdown, afflicted by sudden overpowering terrors. She returns home, and becomes the housekeeper, appreciated, if inarticulately, by her father, taken for granted by her lazy mother.

Colin goes to work on a neighbouring farm, expecting in time to inherit the Beacon. Berenice, the pretty one, marries young, to an older man, and lives a contented life. Frank, silent and watchful as a child, leaves home as soon as he can. He goes to London, gets a job on a newspaper, marries and is a success; but he never comes home and does not even write.

The novel opens with the mother's death, and May alone in the house. Colin and Berenice are agreed that Frank should not be told their mother has died. He has forfeited the right. How he has done so is not immediately clear – unless you have read the blurb. That tells you he wanted "fame and money" and got them by writing about his old home, his family, his past; that is, by publishing a misery memoir. What he says is horrible; it causes his siblings shame and bewilderment. Previously respected, they are now shunned in the neighbourhood. They keep their mother in ignorance of his book – easy enough since she never goes out and never reads the papers.

There is worse still. They are not only deeply hurt, but May at least is also puzzled. Like Colin and Berenice, she knows that Frank's book is full of lies. Their childhood was perfectly ordinary and mostly happy. Yet May is nagged by doubt: is it possible there is some truth in what Frank wrote, and that she has buried the memory of it? Rationally, she knows this is nonsense; yet the doubt is corrupting. Hill leaves a window of suspicion open, if only by a chink – might there be a connection between the terrors that afflicted her at university and suppressed memories? There is no protection against malice, but if we can't trust the past, what can we trust?

Hill writes with a lovely economy. She presents the surface of life exactly and vividly, sketching her characters with a few sure strokes, and with an eye and ear for the illuminating detail. But she is also aware of what goes on below the surface, and while you feel she knows her characters thoroughly, you realise she also knows that there is much that remains unknowable about others. Frank cannot explain, even to himself, why he wrote this memoir that brought so much misery to his brother and sisters; and yet it "had given him satisfaction. He had changed the way things were seen and the way they would be remembered." And this, we realise, is a corruption of the spirit, for it is Colin, May and Berenice who cannot escape the cupboard under the stairs.