WATSON'S APOLOGY

by Beryl Bainbridge ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 1985

What begins as a wonderful black farce from the usually sharp, crisp Bainbridge (Injury Time, etc.) gets blurred into something darker, stranger, an almost Kafkaesque tale of a damaged couple and their tragic end--a story based on a real murder case. Not only are there fewer laughs as time goes on, but the misery surfaces and explodes into violence, and the detached narrative loses some of the sparkle as it shifts from the comic to the bizarre. The novel opens with a wonderfully farcical courtship section. John Selby Watson, headmaster and cleric, a stout 40, writes Anne Armstrong to say that he had admired her years ago at a gathering and that he wants to marry her. Almost 40 herself, trapped by poverty in drab lodgings with a sister she detests, Anne makes up her mind to accept his marriage proposal even before she meets him. (She doesn't remember him at all.) Their meeting is a beautifully orchestrated comedy with the principal characters lamenting their past--she her lost fortune, he his lost mother--and in the background, a Mrs. Quin acting as a Greek chorus, first musing ""they will never mix"" and then concluding ""how alike they are. They are made for each other."" The amazing thing is that although Anne can barely stifle her dislike for him, later she realizes that this absurd union is actually a love match. But after a couple of happy years of marriage, the awful disintegration begins: Watson remains buried in his books and projects, while Anne, pained to realize how little she can affect him, drifts into loneliness and becomes increasingly indisposed--a hysterical (deranged?) woman who is ""always demanding attention' or pity ""for poor little me."" Meanwhile, Watson, turned inward and a bookworm, can give her so little. And ""the accumulation of little wrongs done to him [by Anne]--a spoiled page, an intercepted letter, a burnt book""--slowly destroy him, burying him in trivialities. Their love turns to hate. Finally, one night after she drinks too much, they get involved in a violent tangle, and he kills her. (""He had not harmed her, merely rid her of the bad things that had kept them apart."") The trial is absurd, a bit repetitious, and in spots funny--and Watson dies years later in prison. Although Anne's character is a little too fuzzy, and though--as the two characters drift into madness--the book loses the sharp bite of Bainbridge's farcical style, this is still a sad, chilling, intelligent, entertaining, and sometimes very strange Bainbridge.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION