The Jilkington drama

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A photograph of the author, Edgar Mittelhölzer, is on the jacket back flap.

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Notes:: Treld Pelkey was the jacket designer. Mark Gerson took the author photograph. A novel about four troubled individuals in the English countryside. Ménage à quatre: Katherine and her German raised, profoundly Catholic daughter, Lili; Harry Jilkington, desperate for a divorce from his absent wife so he can marry Katherine; and widowed son, Garvin, obsessed with the memory of dead wife and father of pre-pubescent Mary. Garvin pursues Lili in half hearted fashion. The plot superficially looks like La Ronde (i.e., Katherine makes love to Garvin, to "save" him; Harry and Lili, for a similar reason). As in all Mittelholzer's novels, violence plays under the surface of events in the form of memories of the Second World War (Harry), Nazism (Katherine and Lili), and insanity (Garvin's eccentricities evolve into suicidal madness in the final, bizarre effort to immolate himself with thousands of firecrackers). No resolution except the recitation of the date and time of Garvin's death from severe burns. Unlike Dirk in Kaywana Blood, nobody seems wiser at the end of this; the abrupt ending signifies no purpose in returning to surviving characters. Again, heavy dialogue; stripped narrative, less natural description than in Guyana work.