CRUSOE'S DAUGHTER

by Jane Gardam ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1986

In previous novels and short stories, this most seductively entertaining of British novelists (The Sidmouth Letters, 1980; God on the Rocks, 1979) has tested--with both glee and a deeper wisdom--the spring and spread of strenuously decorous-to-eccentric Anglo Saxon attitudes, as well as inner muck and muddle. Here, Gardam tells an eight-decade tale, with perhaps more hortatory spine than usual, about a loving, lovable, admirable woman, marooned--by circumstance, obligation, and in a way (like that of her life-model, the fictional Robinson Crusoe), by her own rebellious nature. In 1904, Polly Flint, aged six, is brought to the Yellow House of her dead mother's sisters on the pristine marsh in northern England, by her seafaring father (who shortly after does down with his ship while waving a gin bottle). A veteran of chaotic foster homes, Polly finds it most agreeable to work on ""goodness"" for gentle Aunt Frances and bleak Aunt Mary--in spite of Mrs. Woods, that mysterious impecunious boarder with the green face, and silently toiling servant Charlotte, whose smile was clearly a ""dud."" Polly grows up good--until those crowded few days when she: discovers the joys of rebellion and imagines she sees an approving angel on the marsh; learns some discouraging physical facts about womanhood; and meets Theo, the man she will love inside-the-boy. Then, for the first time, she reads Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and elevates its hero: ""the last man on earth to endure imprisonment on an island but he came to terms with it. . . He was like women have to be almost always, on an island. Stuck. Imprisoned."" Yet she and Crusoe were ""separate and singled out."" Through the years, separate and special, Polly will see others founder on tragedy, guilt and on gallant journeys; old secrets will rise from reefs of the past; there will be times of lusty joy, rage and madness. At the last, the wild marsh is symbolically sunk in developers' detritus, and Polly's island shrinks. Still, in a closing ghostly conversation with her fictional hero, Crusoe (who gave her a life of some happy times but not love) reflects that ""there's something to be said for islands."" For Gardam fans--again a skewering humor; a fine weave of many lives; and here, a fanciful if rueful salute to a solitary, coping life, which began with abandonment and ended on a patch of island--but with all flags flying.

Pub Date: March 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION