Wish Her Safe at Home

I first
read
Wish Her Safe at Home
when I was chairing the judges of the 1982 Booker Prize. The rules were that each publisher in the UK could submit two novels—the assumption being that they would choose the best two on their list. That meant that about one hundred novels—the top titles of the year—were submitted. The judges had to read these in about four months, so it was wise to keep notes on each one to prevent them all merging into a mental fog. With me the notes often amounted to no more than a few lines. But the other day I looked up what I had recorded about
Wish Her Safe at Home
, and found that it occupied a whole enthusiastic page of my miniscule handwriting. I listed about forty page references, and reminders of what seemed (and still seem) to me the most brilliant passages. At the top of the page I wrote a general summary:

“Impressive study of woman going quietly and genteelly crazy. Skill of the presentation is that all is seen through her mind, so when she comes into contact with the outside world you understand her and feel awkward about her craziness.”

“Feel awkward about” is the nub of it, and it appeared to me to sum up the reaction of my fellow judges when I started to enthuse about the book at our first meeting. Anyone who has done book-prize judging will have got used to the vast differences in personal taste that expose themselves once you get down to the job of selection. The assumption that five people of pretty similar cultural background will feel more or less the same about a book they’ve all read carefully is exploded in the first five minutes of discussion. And it was exploded on this occasion, but with a difference. My fellow judges were all highly intelligent people, whose opinions I respected. But their response to my advocacy of Benatar’s novel was something between embarrassment and physical discomfort, almost as if I’d made an indecent suggestion. I don’t recall precisely what they said, but I am clear that it didn’t amount to a reasoned and systematic critique of the novel. It was more like a semi-articulated wish to drop a disturbing or distressing subject.

So, as it was four against one, we dropped it. But in retrospect their unwillingness to countenance further discussion seems to me a tribute to the book’s power. It had got under their skins, and no wonder. For it is one of the most disturbing books I have ever read, and, though it may seem a strange compliment to pay to a work that I consider a masterpiece, I can think of quite a number of people whom I would counsel against reading it. It disturbs, to put it bluntly, because Rachel, the mad narrator, is very like us. Admittedly, she takes things to extremes. Traits that we all recognize in ourselves are, in her case, blown up into intense inner (and sometimes public) dramas. Nevertheless, they are the same traits. We all, all the time, carry on an interior monologue which pressgangs the people we meet, even chance acquaintances and passersby, into our private fictions and fantasies, and allocates them roles in our plot. This is because people are opaque, but social life forces us to interpret their motives and meanings. Any conversation exposes us to imagined, or intended, slights, rebuffs, invitations and unspoken messages. We have to read others as they have to read us, and where there is reading there is bound to be misreading, and doubt about which is which. It is out of this network of complexities that Benatar creates Rachel. She is a mistress of misunderstanding. Her first encounter with the amiable assistant in the chemist’s shop, for example, mimics with painful acuteness the universal process of tension, hope, invitation and apprehension that structures human interaction. It shows us ourselves in a mad mirror. It reminds us how thin the boundaries are between the mad and the imaginative, the mad and the sensitive, the mad and the acute.

That Rachel is a version of our secret selves helps to explain one of the most curious things about the book—the fact that we are, from the start, on her side. We fear for her. Our hackles rise when others approach her. We harbour black suspicions about anyone who seems out to deceive her. Benatar encourages this paranoia in us by not letting us know about other people’s motives. How trustworthy is Mr. Wymark? He is a lawyer, which ought to put him beyond reproach, but we feel uncomfortable about his being so friendly with Roger and Celia, the beneficiaries of Rachel’s generosity. And how trustworthy are they? Do they target Rachel right from the start? Is Roger perfectly aware, when he strips off to do the gardening, that he will inflame poor Rachel’s desires? Does he tell Celia, when he gets home, that there’s a crazy old bat ripe for exploitation, and that if they play things right she’ll be eating out of their hand? Is their invitation to Rachel to be Thomas’s godmother just a cynical ploy? Or perhaps only Roger is the devious one and Celia, at any rate at first, hangs back or feels awkward and ashamed about what her husband is doing? It’s possible to read her tongue-tied, embarrassed behaviour like that, just as it is almost impossible to read Roger’s smarmy denials of any age-gap between Rachel and himself as honest and aboveboard. When Celia says “Just so long as you don’t believe we’re insincere, we really couldn’t bear that, could we, darling?” the atmosphere crackles with suspicion. It sounds like a callous in-joke. Or are all these fears just our imagination? Are we, like Rachel, seeing things askew when we invent base and unscrupulous motives for two perfectly decent, friendly young people?

Her memory of Tony Simpson, the boy who almost made love to her, arouses our doubts and anxieties in a similar way. We know enough about the twenty-year-old Rachel, by this time, to consider her socially maladjusted to quite a serious extent, and this makes the boy’s attentions seem ugly and false. Is he, we wonder, doing it for a bet? Did he intend to boast afterwards, among his chuckling cronies, about having sex with a freak? Doesn’t it give the game away when he begs her not to tell of his failure if she should ever meet “any of the others” and they should “allude to this in any way”? But, after all, this might just be the discomfiture of a young man who feels himself disgraced and doesn’t want his friends to know. Benatar doesn’t allow us anything definite to hang our suspicions on, yet he arouses them. As the scene develops, the relationship shifts. The boy feels ashamed and diminished because of his premature ejaculation, but Rachel’s reaction is intelligent and loving. She strives to restore his damaged self-respect, and her generosity, it seems, evokes a generous response in him. His assessment of her appears to change: she has ceased to be a joke for him and has become an object of love. Of course, this story we make up about the boy and his motives may all be false. For that matter, Rachel’s account of the episode, which is all we have to go on, may be far from the truth, for she is scarcely the most reliable of narrators. Benatar has lured us into fiction-making, and so, again, brought home our kinship to Rachel who, like Benatar, is a fiction-maker above all.

Because we feel protective on Rachel’s account, we worry when she does not. The letter from the bank telling her she is £15 overdrawn is a chill blast for us, a premonition, we fear, of ruin and want. But Rachel blithely sweeps it aside. The portrait of Horatio Gavin, which she builds her new life around, may, we are uncomfortably aware, not be a portrait of Gavin at all. The dealer who sells it to her evidently has no idea who the sitter was; to him, he is only “the unknown cavalier”; but Rachel (“Unknown, indeed!”) assumes he is simply ignorant. What haunts us is the thought that she may find out her mistake, if it is a mistake. We are anxious that her illusions should be preserved. We do not want to see her reduced to despair. So we are constantly on tenterhooks in case her ability to reinterpret events to suit her fantasies should falter or collapse. In the same way, we’re edgy with apprehension when she’s among other people, in case her madness should become apparent. The church service—one of the cleverest scenes in this matchlessly clever book—is a torment to us because, thanks to the cunning of the narrative method, we can’t be sure how much, if anything, Rachel says out loud, and how much is just interior monologue. “‘Some hope!’ I said—I thought quite wittily—staring around me in defiance.” That certainly sounds as if she speaks, and we shiver with embarrassment at the possibility.

Her character is complex but entirely convincing. At its core lies fear of suffering, not merely her own but that of others. Because she is highly sensitive, other people’s pain hurts her. The fate of little Alfredo Rampi is a horror she hardly dares to let her mind approach. Among the griefs over others’ suffering lodged deep in her memory is the death of the gentle young man in Paradise Street who had a club foot and kept a rabbit in the back yard, and was knocked down and killed when she was ten. The embarrassing scene on the train when she holds forth about a hanging, drawing and quartering to a hard-of-hearing fellow passenger is an index not of social maladjustment but of pathological hypersensitivity—“I’ve just read the most frightful description...and I just can’t stop reliving it.” Because she is so defenceless against the world’s cruelty, she can only withdraw. She builds an imaginative life that will shut out the real, and she has done this since childhood. In those early days she hung in her bedroom seven pictures torn from magazines, and used to inhabit them “almost literally,” living in seven different countries, with seven different professions, and fictional families and friends culled from her favourite books. This decision to retreat and spend her life among fictions that have become embedded deep inside herself, explains why, though she cares about others’ pain, she is so resolutely and desperately self-absorbed: “When it came down to it there was no one I really cared about. Nothing that happened to others could genuinely affect me.” This truth which she bravely forces herself to confront is paradoxically evidence not of callousness but of sensitivity.

Her instincts and desires are good and entirely commonplace —you could almost say universal. She wants to be loved, she wants to be admired, she wants to be a success, she wants to give others pleasure, she wants to stay young. Unfortunately she learns quite early in life that she is unlikely to fulfil any of these ambitions: “I lacked both character and know-how and had always been unusually timid.” Given these drawbacks, there are really only two alternatives open to her. She could opt for despondency and depression—“the glooms,” as she calls it—and she knows how dreadful that can be. She remembers the desolation she felt at menopause. She recalls feeling “sick with deprivation and jealousy” at the thought of Roger and Celia making love. These black moments must, she realizes, be avoided at all costs. So she chooses the other alternative, which is to pretend that her ambitions have been fulfilled—that is to say, to go mad. She can afford the luxury of madness only because of her great-aunt’s bequest. Without that, she would have had to stay in her grim flat with Sylvia, would have had to carry on in commonplace misery. Instead she is able to rewrite her childhood as joyous and loving, mingle with stars, be a star herself and become, eventually, a “bride of Christ.” The religious ecstasy she ascends to is an entirely plausible extension and fulfillment of her imaginative life. Her allusion to King David at her leaving party (so side-splitting to her raucous and stupid colleagues) shows that she has been brought up to know about the Bible, so where else should her imagination go for its ultimate flight? Further, the phenomenal powers of self-deception she has trained herself to exercise, that enable her to see everything in a false light, make her—as some would say—a natural candidate for religious belief. Faith can move mountains...or, in Rachel’s case, varicose veins.

The veracity of her psychology is worth emphasizing, because a mere summary of the book might give the impression that it is fantastic or comic. Though it is composed almost entirely of Rachel’s fantasy, and most of its episodes are ludicrous, it is terribly and seriously real. It is also, I believe, wholly original. Theorists hold that there are only a dozen or so fictional plots, all of them present in classics of early literature, which later works re-jig. But Benatar’s work does not correspond to any of the prototypes, so far as I can see, or only in ways that are so remote as to emphasize its singularity. You might say that a story about someone who is inherently good, but also mad, and who suffers chronic delusions about herself, which her adventures expose, often with ludicrous results—you might say that this resembles the plot of Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
, which is certainly one of world literature’s master plots. But the differences are greater than the similarities. Rachel is alone—she doesn’t have a comic servant or protector as Don Quixote has, and more importantly we see everything from inside her head, whereas Cervantes’s mad knight is viewed externally. It matters too, of course, that Rachel is a woman, and Benatar, by some extraordinary feat of sexual ambivalence, has entered a female consciousness in a way that very few male authors have been able to do (or so it seems to me—women readers must be the ultimate judges). At all events, these disparities make the
Don Quixote
comparison look way off target. Yet no other prototypes suggest themselves.

So my fellow Booker-judges seem to me, looking back, to have been even more wrong than they appeared at the time, and my offence, in cravenly giving way to them, instead of sticking to my guns, looks the more woeful. I hope this Introduction will be some kind of expiation.

—JOHN CAREY
Merton College, Oxford
Summer 2007