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September 11
Hardback
• Paperback
Something Dangerous
by Patrick Redmond
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Reviewed by Jeanne M. Jacobson
"For nothing can excuse the sheer awfulness of what they did.
Nothing, not youth, loneliness, separation from their families.
Their behavior was not that of misguided youths. It was the work of
monsters."
This is a time when what sells in America--more accurately, what is
sold to us--is horror unalloyed: mutilation, slow torture, blood
spurting, spraying, streaming; conscienceless killers motivated by
delight in victims' pain and, explicitly or implicitly, by past
parental abuse. We shudder fearlessly: statistically speaking,
however often we seek out fictional wannabe-worse-thans, we are
unlikely to encounter the next Dahmer or Gacy or Bundy. Highly-hyped
novels aim for the coin in hand today, readers who'll recall the
author's name if not the plot, and enough books sold that no
sensible used-book store will touch them next month.
At half past three in the morning, having read Something Dangerous
through the day and most of the night, I went to bed comforting
myself with a litany: It's only a story. It's only a story. In the
morning, I realized it was a story I didn't believe. Now, many days
later, I think that story, which I will never believe, will trouble
me for years to come.
Imagine confinement that will last for years in a place where both
custom and policy make the most defenseless the most despised; where
any sign of weakness marks the sufferer as a target for abuse; where
appeal to authority for protection results in terrifying punishment;
where in a hierarchy of authority all but the richest and most
powerful are at risk; and where at each level in that hierarchy, the
time-honored method of soothing one's own unhappiness is to inflict
public humiliation and pain on weaker creatures. Suppose that an
innocent sufferer is protected, and becomes safe from torment and
free from threat of torment. Is it conceivable that the protector
and the protection are pure evil, while the tormentors are ordinary
or even esteemed? Then to admire evil seems inescapable.
The quotation that heads this review is an excerpt from a purported
letter to The Times, 17th October 1957; its author writes from a
rectory to protest the newspaper's commentary on several recent
deaths at a British public (i.e. private) school. More than twenty
years later, a down-at-the-heels reporter has achieved his goal: to
hear the truth of what happened at Kirkston Abbey from "the gaunt,
middle-aged man with the secret eyes who had once been the most
infamous schoolboy in England."
The time reverts to 1957, at the beginning of a school term. At
first everything at Kirkston Abbey seems ordinary, though thereminds us of how good she can
be, and that suggests that maybe Mallory has a soul,
after all.
atmosphere resembles that of Tom Brown's Schooldays rather than
Good-bye Mr. Chips. The cast: students--including a boy from a less
well-to-do family than his peers', whose accent causes him to be
singled out for torment by the Latin master; masters and their
families; clergy; police; solicitors; reporters; Satan and demons.
By the end of the story, seven are dead, several severely injured,
some mad. One, by an undeserved quirk of fate, will become the most
infamous schoolboy in England. Addition to the cast: readers.
"Devouring a book" is a clich. Something Dangerous swallows the
reader whole.
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