Southern Gothic revenge

Saturday, 26th October 2002

The children's misguided attempts at revenge, or rather retribution, by way of a king cobra dropped from a height through the open roof of Danny Ratliff's car, hint at the peculiar extravagance of this narrative, in which every bush, every wall, every tree is itemised, but in which the broader outlines occasionally fail to cohere. It is all horribly persuasive, yet at the same time not quite convincing, and one's reaction is one of bewilderment as much as of respect. Respect is unavoidable, for the proliferating invention if not for the merciless detail. The author seems to have paced all these streets, recoiled from all those flies in the line of duty, yet at the same time failed to distance herself from what eventually turns into a maze in which the reader is imprisoned. Just how much the writer herself felt imprisoned is hard to say. There is genuine mastery in her ability to come to terms with the almost unmanageable mass of the novel, which becomes more quaint, more indigenous by the page. The revenge motif is almost lost, surfacing briefly in attempts at murder which amount to very little. Even as children Harriet and Hely are inventive only in disappointing ways, less inventive, in fact, than Harriet's grandmother and great-aunts, who carry on a bland, blind continuation of the customs that prevailed when they themselves were young. It comes as something of a relief when adult concerns - the dismissal of a beloved servant, an accident, a death - take over, although these too have a distancing effect. There is a shadow in the form of Danny Ratliff, who sees Harriet in the back of a car at her great-aunt's funeral. Suddenly (but we have been led to this point) the discordant, meandering strands coalesce. The terrifying closing chapters, in which anything can and does happen, are worth all the preceding pages put together. Suspense, of a physically uncomfortable intensity, brings the story to its conclusion.

A question remains. Who is the little friend? Is it Harriet with her desire to exact justice for her dead brother, whom she never knew? Is it Hely, who unwittingly gets rid of some awkward evidence and is there to do Harriet's bidding? Or, more likely, is it Danny Ratliff, who has dim memories of a birthday party to which he was invited but to which he was too poor to bring a present? The curious miasma of physical and spiritual sickness that rises from these 500-odd pages precludes any kind of straight answer. It is as if the whole extraordinary exercise has been designed to exact its own punishment by a writer so far out of the ordinary that she can be compared to no one else.

The Little Friend is good, very good; it is undeniably superior. But I doubt if I shall want to read it a second time.