Elizabeth Jane Howard, the English writer, is beautiful, gifted, well-connected and now quite successful. She was also starved, abused, divorced and generally neglected from childhood on. Given this background, it’s informative from the point of view of how a writer works to see what she did with the material she had. I read “Slipstream,” her memoir in which she matter-of-factly inventoried the things that happened to her and their effect on her; then read “Falling,” a novel using some of the same material to weave a story about a woman much like herself who falls prey to a sociopath; and then watched “Falling,” the movie with Michael Kitchen playing the sociopath, so seductive that it’s not hard at all to understand how the character becomes hypnotized. Penelope Wilton is the intelligent, appealing author.
The memoir is a strongly coherent and detailed account that is also closely used in the BBC series called “The Cazalets,” where Howard’s girlish self is split out into several different cousins -- one bookish, one theatrical, one simply clumsy -- and given some of the same puzzles that caused the real girl to struggle, for instance a woman-loving father who rather lost the boundary between being a father and being a lover -- nothing serious, but enough to confuse a child.
Much hinges on living accommodations, a sequence of English rooms, flats, cottages and rather grand houses. The real Howard finally found solace in a cottage with a garden, where she was much helped by an experienced and strong gardener. The best side of her sociopath comes from his ability to garden, which he does rather reluctantly, but which seems to help him with uncanny ability to see a woman’s needs and supply them in a tactful way. It might be a bit unfair to portray her real-life friend this way, but it’s only his skills and knowledge that she uses in her novel -- not his nature. If “Slipstream” is to be trusted, this was one man who did not abuse intimacy nor did they seem to be lovers anyway.
The plot of “Falling” depends upon a cottage in a village which the character, “Daisy,” has acquired as a sign of success and also, perhaps, as a substitute for a relationship with a man and a refuge from the latest abandoning husband. It is established that she doesn’t resist sex very successfully when that particular betrayer, coming back for his briefcase and finding her sobbing, comforts her with his body.
But the book starts with Henry, the sociopath, declaring “She has left me.” He is confused, but more indignant than hurt. He’s a reluctant gardener but an enthusiastic reader, and both characteristics give him the ways to connect with Daisy. When Daisy falls literally and is badly hurt -- twice -- he tends her as though she were a sensitive plant and then moves on to “bedding.” The book continues on, alternating a chapter about Henry who plots and rationalizes and fails to recognize his own predatory behavior, justifying it all with his neediness and failure (though he never defines failure as something attributable to himself), with a chapter about Daisy, who’s almost like a child in her determinations and her sorrows. The more we become involved with her dilemmas, the less friendly we feel towards Henry, until he finally strikes her.
In the novel it is Daisy’s daughter, her gay friend, and her female agent who see through Henry and finally unmask him, ending the relationship and probably dooming the cottage to re-sale. Henry simply moves on to the next woman. Daisy reflects intelligently, but one doesn’t feel she’s really grown up even yet, so it’s a good thing she has friends and relatives to take care of her. But in the end she is resolving to pay more attention to being a good friend to her daughter.
The movie, however, moves much closer to feminism. Movies must always be stripped down and simplified to fit the different medium, so the daughter is left out. The biggest change is the nearly political “awakening” of Daisy. When she is struck, the effect is something like the slap in the face the old movies used to put in the script when a woman became hysterical, whereupon she says, “Thanks, I needed that!” Penelope Wilton is so skillful that she makes all this seem realistic, even applaudable. “Good for you, Daisy!” we think.
We already know about Henry’s past from his point of view because of his internal reflections and his sad letters to Daisy, which in the movie are accompanied by enlightening flashbacks of the truth. In the book the truth is revealed to Daisy by a bit of sleuthing, some of it provided by a paid detective: short and blunt. In the movie Daisy goes through Henry’s papers, which include a low class porn mag. Then, using them and her memory of his stories as guides, she goes in search of the truth and confronts the women of his past. This is much more dramatic. Even so, imdb.com reveals that some (female, of course) viewers were inclined to give Henry the benefit of the doubt. Amazing.
These forces are so powerful -- the capable male who is pleasing in bed MUST exist somewhere! We just don’t want to believe otherwise. And weepy, childish women -- even though they can make enough money to buy an English cottage and pay a gardener -- are simply “spoiled” and unreliable. Especially if they are beautiful. This was even the opinion of Elizabeth Jane Howard about herself! One has the feeling that she wrote this book to break the clinging stereotype in her own and her culture’s construct of the world. Perhaps this is what many fine writers do -- write to enlighten themselves. Readers tag along.
This book reminded me of two others, one written recently by an Englishman, Bill Liversidge (a nom de plume) who lives near my ancestral hometown of Strachan in Scotland: “A Half Life of One.” It’s a thriller in which the sociopathic man kidnaps his beautiful lady -- he’d be able to seduce few! The other is a 1947 book I read as a child. By Jon Godden, Rumer Godden’s sister, I think it must be “The House by the Sea.” It’s not the sociopath that reminds me (I think the man is a WWII German who is sheltered by a woman) but the house. One of the best things about good books is that they point to other good books. Maybe I can nab a copy of “The House by the Sea” to reread.
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