Reading Stephen Dobyns’ Boy in the Water, which has, along with the usual “victim turned villain” bad guy, an entirely less usual type in the form of Fritz Skander, a polished backstabber of the Iago school. I read the first scene in which his MO is revealed to the reader with at first bewilderment and then a real frisson – because at first I thought “blundering idiot, he’s scaring her with his reassurances and he can’t see it” and then I realised “he knows exactly what he’s doing – o-mi-god”. From then on, I was more apprehensive when he got the other characters alone – some of whom were very vulnerable, and all of whom thought of him as a nice guy – than the “real” bad guy, who was just another miserable psycho. What’s more, you’re never in his mind. He is written completely transparently, revealing himself through speech that is on the surface deeply sympathetic, but whose subtext plays upon people’s insecurity and guilt. And that’s craft.

Very pleased recently to turn up Stevie Davies’ website and find that I am not in fact the only person who appreciates her. Which would be a great shame; she is a writer of wide repertoire, uncomfortable integrity and elegant knotty prose. If there is theme that she revisits, it is militarization (particularly of women’s lives) and brutality, from her first novel Boy Blue, through Arms and the Girl to her latest The Element of Water, in which the children of former Nazis meet and watch the old racial cruelties replayed on the intimate stage of a girl’s school in 1958.

Then there is her gently satirical look at Bronte fandom (she is herself a Bronte scholar, author of Emily Bronte: Heretic) in Four Dreamers and Emily, her – again uncompromising – story of a death in Closing the Book, her study of a ‘good woman’ in The Web of Belonging, and Impassioned Clay in which an inoclastic woman explores and imagines the life and death of a seventeenth century woman found with her head encased in a scold’s bridle. The last ties in with her interest in that torn and rowdy century, about which she wrote in Impassioned

Spirits: Women of the English Revolution: 1640-1660.

Why she is a must-read: that elegant knotty prose, the versatility, the scholarship, the uncompromisingness – Arms and the Girl is heartbreaking, a brutal tragedy of child who is a scapegoat and a child who is a victim; its final scenes are painful to read. After what January and Prue have suffered, there is no healing – the exquisite descriptions, the feminism, the occasional playfulness, the sense of life as (to quote the last sentences of Four Dreamers): “And then again the sunlight./ And the shadow again.”

Where the author puts a twist in the last page that leaves you thinking, I thought it was all sorted, why did he do that, what did he mean by that??? It’s bad enough as a reader to be trying to second-guess an author’s intention, but if one’s a writer …

Here it is, one of those finds in a second hand bookstore, Going to the Dogs by Russell McRae. As far as I know, the only novel he has written; perhaps it was the only one he felt compelled to write. He’s a teacher, but in the person of his protagonist he has no mercy on family life, small towns, police, the education system, and the middle class (or any class for that matter). His protagonist is bright, cynical Billy McKenzie, survivor of a his parents’ marital warfare (think “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, twenty years on), veteran player of the educational game, who likes the release of alcohol and drugs but likes his savings more, because money means escape. His bonds are to his dropout friend Rocky, scholarly in drug-lore, illiterate in school, his clear-eyed, hopeless sister, Anne, and his girlfriend, nice, middle class Poppy Richardson, whose family, for all its surface order, seems to him little different from his own. When Poppy becomes pregnant, Billy has a final series of showdowns with school, his family, hers, and with her downtrodden mother’s encouragement, Poppy elopes with Billy.

Then there is this ending. The book has been entirely in Billy’s head to this point. Billy is celebrating that “I’ve got nothing but loose ends ahead of me, Poppy. What’s behind me is a big, tangled web, and behind me is where it’s going to stay.” Poppy’s reaction is, “It’s a scary idea, but I’ve always known you were scary, Billy. Now I know why.” And a little later on,

“If loose ends are what you want, I guess they must be what I want, too. As long as I’m not one of them … I’m not, am I?”

“Honey,” Billy said, laughing, “you’ll never know.”

But Poppy thought she did.

She definitely knew that Billy was speeding faster than ever, and was about to get a ticket from the cop in the cruiser that had pulled slyly out behind him as his truck sped past the infamous Sleeping Beauty speed trap Rocky had warned him about. The cop was holding off to see how far over the speed limit Billy would get before he spotted his nemesis behind him.

Rocky warned him, Poppy thought, and far be it from me to play watchdog.

Loose ends?

Two could play at that game.

So the author goes into Poppy’s mind for the first and only time in the book, and captures that moment of jeopardy and detachment, and then leaves it unresolved (What’s the cop going to do? Are they going to leave town? What’s she going to do? Leave him?) Just when you thought everything was winding down to a hopeful ending, zing!