The Means of Escape
In her final book of fiction--published, alas, posthumously--Penelope  Fitzgerald allows us a present of several very strange pasts, her narratives  ranging from the 17th century to the late 20th. The title tale, set in New  Zealand in 1852, seems to resemble a cautionary fable about a spinster and an  escaped con. But in Fitzgerald's hands, it is infinitely more. When the prisoner  ambushes the rector's daughter, disputation and attraction soon surmount fear,  and yet with each bit of information he reveals, Alice Godley is on shakier  ground. "I'm not innocent," he asserts, "but I was wrongly incriminated." He  admits that hehadmeant to frighten her, "but that is no longer my aim  at the moment." And, as a gesture of good faith, "He told her that the name he  went by, which was not his given name, was Savage." Over the course of just 18  pages (which make it the longest in the book), Fitzgerald plucks comedy from  terror, sadness from hilarity, and the surreal from the seemingly concrete.  Here, as elsewhere, she gently but decisively upends her characters, and  readers. And Savage is only the first of many uninvited or inopportune guests inThe Means of Escape.None of the eight stories collected here leads to a decisive or luminous moment.  In fact, resolution is not the object of these slant, rule-breaking pieces.  Fitzgerald wrote "The Axe," her first published work of fiction, for a ghost-story contest (judged by the unlikely trio of Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith,  and horror actor Christopher Lee), and it was printed in the LondonTimesand then inThe Times Book of Ghost Stories(1977). Taking the form of a  letter from someone charged with a recent round of dismissals, "The Axe"  concerns the layoffs' effects on one ancient clerk:The actual notification to the redundant staff passed off rather  better, in a way, than I had anticipated. By that time everyone in the office  seemed inexplicably conversant with the details, and several of them in fact had  gone far beyond their terms of reference--young Patel, for instance, who openly  admits that he will be leaving us as soon as he can get a better job, taking me  aside and telling me that to such a man as Singlebury dismissal would be like  death. Dismissal is not the right world, I said. But death is, Patel replied.In "Beehernz," the title character is still alive, though even fans of his  conducting may have assumed otherwise, owing to his disappearance from the  English musical scene long ago. Fitzgerald composed this lighter but no less  twisting 1997 comedy of aspirations at the invitation of the BBC, for a series  of stories on musical themes, and read it aloud on Radio 3 that year. In her  nocturne, a deputy musical director decides to coax the reclusive Beehernz out  of Scottish isolation by giving him the chance to conduct Mahler once more,  despite the fact that he had fled London some 40 years earlier after hearing  that he was to conduct Mahler's Eighth. His objection? "It is too noisy." (The  author previously had her comedic way with the BBC inHuman Voices, and here, too,  she seems to be tweaking it over the mammoth 1959stagingof Mahler's "Symphony of a  Thousand," which it mounted to wipe out an unwanted budget surplus.)"The Red-Haired Girl" (published in theTimes Literary Supplementfor  September 11, 1998) also explores what happens to the uninvited, as five British  landscape students make a pilgrimage to Brittany. But Palourde (lacking as it  does good food, good weather, and any notion of the picturesque) is not a  painter's Platonic ideal, as its inhabitants well know. Only oneartiste,  Hackett, even manages to find a model, and she confounds him utterly before she  disappears. The multilayered closing piece, "At Hiruharama," matches this story  and "The Means of Escape" in violent economy and depth and contains yet another  person who appears out of the narrative blue. First published in 1992, this  roundabout New Zealand family history offers ever more proof of Fitzgerald's  late, great flowering.--Kerry Fried