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Book #12: The Beckoning Lady
Mar. 6th, 2008 09:46 pmBook #12 of 2008 is The Beckoning Lady, by Margery Allingham (1955).
I finished this one on Wednesday afternoon. It's one of the last of the Albert Campion stories by Margery Allingham. Campion may be best known to nerds by way to the BBC dramatizations that starred Peter Davison, AKA the Fifth Doctor.
There is a curiously lunatic and sinister tone about the dialogue and characters, and it's not just because murders are being committed. There is a bunch of strange business with pliable rubber masks. There are ridiculously enormous (and somehow unwholesome) wind instruments made of bladders and transparent plastic that disturb Campion so much he describes one as a "pornograph." The action is full of significant glances and the dialogue contains frustrating double-meanings that are never made apparent. There are sinister clowns, a giggling detective, a man with eggshell skull, a house that seems to be only the front half (like one of those hollow-backed women from Irish myth), and unexpected ice cream.
The dialogue and action is confusing and opaque for about 50 pages, and then suddenly it acquires a kind of emergent order, but one that is simply overlaid as a thin veneer over a terrifying social abyss. The reader would not be surprised if tea on the lawn is followed by canabalism in the drawing room. One expects Cthulhu to show up by page 180.
The early Campion stories were very basic murder mysteries that stood out because of Allingham's unusual strength of characterization and ability to paint a scene. They gradually acquired more depth and became progressively darker, eventually turning into novels that almost read like forgotten scripts from The Prisoner.
Edit: Also, I liked it!
I finished this one on Wednesday afternoon. It's one of the last of the Albert Campion stories by Margery Allingham. Campion may be best known to nerds by way to the BBC dramatizations that starred Peter Davison, AKA the Fifth Doctor.
There is a curiously lunatic and sinister tone about the dialogue and characters, and it's not just because murders are being committed. There is a bunch of strange business with pliable rubber masks. There are ridiculously enormous (and somehow unwholesome) wind instruments made of bladders and transparent plastic that disturb Campion so much he describes one as a "pornograph." The action is full of significant glances and the dialogue contains frustrating double-meanings that are never made apparent. There are sinister clowns, a giggling detective, a man with eggshell skull, a house that seems to be only the front half (like one of those hollow-backed women from Irish myth), and unexpected ice cream.
The dialogue and action is confusing and opaque for about 50 pages, and then suddenly it acquires a kind of emergent order, but one that is simply overlaid as a thin veneer over a terrifying social abyss. The reader would not be surprised if tea on the lawn is followed by canabalism in the drawing room. One expects Cthulhu to show up by page 180.
The early Campion stories were very basic murder mysteries that stood out because of Allingham's unusual strength of characterization and ability to paint a scene. They gradually acquired more depth and became progressively darker, eventually turning into novels that almost read like forgotten scripts from The Prisoner.
Edit: Also, I liked it!
