An unsentimental Hungarian education: Abigail, by Magda Szabó, reviewed

Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the mid-1990s with the translations of her novels The Door and Katalin Street. Abigail, which was originally published in 1970 and is her best-known book, now appears in English for the first time in a superb translation by Len Rix.

Set over six months, from September 1943 to March 1944 when Germany occupies Hungary, Abigail follows the 14-year-old Gina Vitay, who is ‘plucked away as if by a bird’ from her privileged life in Budapest and sent to a remote fortress-like Protestant boarding school for girls by her father, a general in the Hungarian army. Gina doesn’t understand why she has been uprooted or why she cannot tell anyone where she has gone (Szabó builds suspense by not explaining it until much later). Distressed and being bullied by the other pupils after refusing to take part in their childish games, she tries to run away. Then Abigail, the statue of a young woman in the school garden who, according to legend, has helped girls with their troubles, leaves a note for Gina under her mattress. What ensues is a thrilling unravelling of everything Gina thought she knew.

Throughout the novel, Szabó’s characters are vivid and amusingly authentic. During a church service, Gina’s inner monologue focuses on a handsome teacher sitting nearby:

It didn’t seem right that a man should have such beautiful eyes. At that moment she would have loved to reassure herself in a mirror that her own eyelashes were even longer than his.

Szabó is skilful, too, at creating moments of heart-rending tension, often through exquisite, evocative prose. When Gina first arrives at the boarding school, for example, she is stripped of her expensive clothes, given a full-length black uniform to wear and told to take off the necklace that the general just bought her as a keepsake:

The little moon tinkled softly as it fell on the table in front of her father ….Both