海角大神

At the center of聽The Love She Left Behind,聽Amanda Coe鈥檚 witty, exuberantly uncharitable second novel, is Patrick Conway, a raging old playwright who lives in a grand house in Cornwall. He bought the place with the proceeds of his 1980s theatrical triumph, "Bloody Empire," acclaimed as a satire on the Falklands War, then just beginning.

Sharing the novel鈥檚 center, though absent, is Patrick鈥檚 wife, Sara, who has just died. She had abandoned her first husband and two children for the playwright over 30 years ago; now the grown son and daughter have arrived to take Patrick to the crematorium to see their mother off. They also have an interest in examining the house: dilapidated, filthy, kippered with cigarette smoke, and presenting a scene of whiskey bottles 鈥渟erried in rows ... a display of historic consumption as formally impressive as an art installation or a tomb offering from an ancient civilization.鈥� Depending on how matters of inheritance stand, the place may or may not have become legally theirs.

Nigel, the eldest, is a lawyer and martyr to hay fever and digestive strife. He is married to an upscale, efficient wife with whom he has two sons. We meet him as he meets his sister, Louise, and her sulking teenage daughter, Holly, getting off the train from Leeds to attend the funeral. Overweight and inadequate, with 鈥減illed coat and misjudged cleavage,鈥� Louise irritates Nigel as usual: 鈥淪oon she would be talking up a plan born of a low-level but persistent crisis: training, relocating, paying off a loan, finishing with her boyfriend, losing weight. None of it ever happened.鈥�

This unmerry band picks Patrick up from his house, and we are treated to a first dose of the playwright鈥檚 stupendously foul character, a toxic blend of selfishness, disdain, and meticulous cruelty. His manner is especially vile toward the hapless Louise and her unlovely daughter.

As in every English novel I have ever read, social class lies at the bottom of this one. Sara (whose given name, Sally, so offended Patrick鈥檚 fine sensibilities that he called her Sara instead) sprang from the working class and was a shop assistant when Patrick walked into her life. Smitten with him though she was, and despite Patrick鈥檚 impassioned pleas, she at first refused to leave her husband and children, in part, it emerges, because her husband promised her a remodeled kitchen if she stayed.

When she did later leave 鈥� the immediate reason being a shabby one that you will have to discover yourself 鈥� the result was her social elevation, and Nigel鈥檚, too 鈥� he was sent to a good private boarding school at Patrick鈥檚 expense, after which he attended Oxford and entered the law. Poor, fat, insecure Louise was palmed off on her Auntie B. and grew up in cultural and material deprivation. Everything about Louise and her children spells underclass woe: 14-year-old Holly, a no-hoper in the making, is moonstruck under the thrall of a 30-year-old 鈥渂oy鈥� friend with a snazzy car, while her brother, Jamie, who eventually shows up, is upholstered in tattoos, sports an earlobe plug, and is signing on to the military for lack of any other idea about his future.

Meanwhile, another character has been at large in the novel. This is Mia; brand conscious, culturally ignorant, and mildly opportunistic, she is a young graduate student who is writing her thesis on 鈥渃ontroversy as media commodity.鈥� She came across the Falklands War during a Googling session and from there to Patrick鈥檚 "Bloody Empire." She ends up staying with Patrick and terrifying Nigel and Louise with the prospect of her marrying the ancient playwright.

I cannot reveal what happens on that front except to say that, in a wonderful comic touch, another remodeled kitchen plays a role. Indeed, Mia is at the heart of the book鈥檚 most entertaining scenes, not least among them a dinner out with Patrick and two old thespian friends from his heyday, Dodie and Lucas. The three elderly people have been drinking steadily for hours before arriving at the restaurant:

"Did old people really speak more loudly because they were deaf, Mia wondered, or just because they had the kind of voices no one had anymore? Dodie had imparted early on in her monologue that she had trained as an actress in the 1960s.

'Julie Christie was in my year at RADA.'

Mia hadn鈥檛 asked her who Julie Christie was. She could look it up later.

Lucas ignored the menu being placed in front of him and button-holed the waiter for a bottle of house red. Dodie, once she had retrieved her reading glasses from the chain where they rested on her mounded bosom, compensated by taking beady interest in her own menu鈥檚 contents. She read most of it aloud, relishing a couple of spelling mistakes and deploring a comprehensive lack of accents and circumflexes."

That鈥檚 only the beginning.

A few letters, notes, and other incunabula from the past written by Patrick and Sara show up throughout the book. Each serves as an exhibit of its creator鈥檚 unfortunate character. Patrick鈥檚 contributions display his thoroughgoing self-centeredness as he lectures Sara on the need for sacrifices 鈥� by which he does not mean his.

His letters also show his delusion about the merit of his play, his one and only success. Mighty with outraged artistic integrity, he writes letters to newspapers and his agent, protesting against the suggestion that his play is a satire on the Falklands War. It isn鈥檛, he insists, 鈥渘ever has been and never will.鈥� On the other hand, though it is an offense against his 鈥渁rtistic conscience,鈥� he does allow the production to move to the (lucrative) West End. If only his reluctance were sham 鈥� but no. As the novel moves on, we better understand the true nature of that decision, with sinking hearts, and the comic awfulness of Patrick begins to metamorphose into pathos.

An excerpt from "Bloody Empire" shows exactly how much the play鈥檚 success must have lain outside itself, and that sad fact is only one of the distressing revelations to emerge, one by one, in this novel. Evidence, all too terribly credible, of past misapprehension and mishandled lives proliferates as the story progresses.

What, at first, seemed purely a high-spirited social comedy darkens up and becomes genuinely heartbreaking. It is more than a little disconcerting, as the two moods are not really integrated but operate independently of each other. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, most of all for the characters and all their little ways so perfectly and acerbically rendered.