Armed With Madness полностью

The novels begins with an arrival, that of the American, Carston, disturbing the peace. What follows is the playing out of a drama in which characters tensely interact until a breaking-point is reached at which they disperse, going their different ways before the novel reassembles them for a violent moment of madness and an ending that brings no resolution, only another arrival, another foreign body; this time a White Russian with no papers, brought over from France in a boat by Felix and landing with him at the foot of their cliff just as Carston is leaving for ever, glad to get away from this “stable and unstable” household. Clarence and Picus bring news of a find: “an odd cup of greenish stone” fished up from the bottom of their well. The cup is just an object, a piece of jade that can be used as an ash-tray, but queer too, a recipient for different identifications: variously declared to be “a victorian finger-bowl”, “the poison-cup of a small rajah”, “an old cup of the sacrament people called ‘big magic’”, or “a Keltic mass cup”. “I can’t tell you anything,” says the wise Vicar consulted as to its identity, who counsels that it be taken back to the well, keeping its silence; “Why couldn’t the thing speak,” Carston frets, “Just once. Dumb was the word for it.” In the movement of the novel, however, the cup is not dumb. It provokes incidents, sets off characters, runs into meanings, reveals. This at one level is quite conventional: the cup is a bit of property owned by Picus’s father that Picus has taken and dropped down the well; perhaps accidentally, more probably with the intention of playing a trick. The cup plunges the novel into Picus’s particular family romance: his love of his mother and his hostility towards his father, whom he believes, or wants to believe, poisoned her with the help of his mistress, “his whore”—a whole Freudian scenario. It also involves the other characters in psychological conflict as they react to the find and then to the cup’s disappearance (Picus hides it); Carston in particular who, at a loss for a role (the constant emphasis is on the staging of a drama), decides that his purpose will be to seduce Scylla but then finds himself caught up in a very different action, a very different novel. For at another level, and most importantly, the cup is more man a psychological prop, a catalyst to bring out private griefs and sexual pains. With it comes the Grail story on which the imagination of the novel turns and with which it seeks to give its vision of dis-ease.