Too good for words

I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point.

I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point.

The strapline tells me to expect a tale of ‘greed, goodness, and an extraordinary miracle’. Well, it doesn’t seem to be about greed at all. There isn’t a greedy person in it. Needy, yes; it deals with need. ‘Goodness’ is more like it. It is an analysis of goodness, and more specifically of kindness, of the moral interconnectedness of human beings.

The ‘extraordinary miracle’ (is there any other sort?) befalls Tommy Carr, the ‘kind man’ of the title, a man who has ‘a deep sense of what was good or even holy but no connection with any church or chapel’. To create universality of meaning, Hill avoids anchoring her tale too fixedly in time and place, but it feels like the 1930s in the industrial north. Tommy marries Eve and takes her to live in the last cottage between the gritty manufacturing town and ‘the peak, touched by sunshine’ that represents freedom and, perhaps, the spiritual world.

Thus Tommy and Eve are placed apart from their families and workmates; other factors also separate them. Thrifty, sober and hardworking, they have a loving, inarticulate mutual understanding. Their one child, Jeannie Eliza, is perfect in every way, in contrast to the many unruly, uncared-for sons of Eve’s downtrodden sister Miriam, just as Miriam’s lazy husband is the opposite of Tommy — the opposite of kind. Tommy and Eve have hens, a vegetable patch, bright china on the dresser.