The Inn At The Edge Of The World

 Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World, 1990

    'What's he a professor of?' asked Jessica who had, intermittently, wondered about this for some time. He didn't strike her as being cast in the donnish mould.

    'Teeth,' said Eric contemptuously. 'He's a dentist.'

    'Ah,' said Jessica. 'How revolting.'

    'He makes a fortune in one way and another,' said Eric, 'and he gets months of holidays.'

    There followed one of those satisfying discussions, in which all parties are in agreement, about the iniquities of the medical and dental professions and the shortcomings of the NHS, leavened by individual accounts of appalling experiences, both surgical and financial, which each participant had undergone at the hands of one or more practitioners of these humane skills.

It is a joy to read (and reread) Alice Thomas Ellis's books, and as I've only read two so far, I speak with the assuredness of opinion as you have only come to expect, Dear Reader – and I can thank side-bar resident dear Ur-Spo over at Spo-Reflections for the introduction. It would seem, however, that her books are not everyone's cup of tea, but I particularly enjoy her shrewd, dry wit and sharp observations of people's frailties. Her characters might be flawed or peculiar but are drawn with an amusing and subtle touch, and her black humour belies what is her strongly conservative Catholic eye when probing the human condition and what she sees as the failings of the modern world.

An observant reader may have noticed I've already had a rave over The 27th Kingdom and today's is another of her books needing some airspace hereabout. As it seems an age since I first read this amusing book (and had plucked out my favourite passages for these pages to then languish forlornly in the Draft Department) I've had to recently read it again to remind me what is going on in her take on the vacuousness of the modern Western Christmas. Not a chore, may I say! She's such fun. And there's always a little sprinkling of the otherwordly, shall we say.

The professor entered with a girl in the duffel coat. He seemed annoyed and Jessica wondered what he had to be cross about when, so far as she knew, nobody was trying to kill him. At present she felt she was the only person in the world with something to be really cross about.

    'They've been at it again,' he said. 'I nearly caught them this time. There's just enough snow to show up footprints on the lawn.'

    'They were playing music,' said the girl in the duffel coat unexpectedly.

    'Bollocks,' said the professor. 'They weren't. It was the wind in the wires.' This was clearly the continuation of an argument which had begun earlier and was leading nowhere.

    'They were,' said the girl, and Mrs H. brightened at the prospect of discord.

    'It was probably the ghosts again,' she said. 'You're haunted.'

    'I'm not haunted,' said the professor, as though he'd been accused of having lice. The distinction of having a ghost was obviously outweighed for him by the nuisance of trespass. If the dancers on the lawn came from another element he still resented them pushing his fence down. 'It's bloody-minded locals,' he said and stroked his crotch fretfully, which made Jessica think of Mike again. Perhaps it was the fault of feminists, she thought, which caused so many men to have to keep publicly checking on their masculinity.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here with these abrupt introductions to some of the local flavour at the Edge of the World and need to put a bit of flesh on these bones. The Inn in question is a hard luck sort of business in the remote and Outer Hebrides, and its desperate Outsider owner, Eric, decides to clutch at some out-of-season business by advertising it widely as a Christmas destination for those who don't want any festive cheer. Despite his wife's scorn, five people actually respond, so the lascivious Mabel decamps to Glasgow at the moment of their arrival, leaving Eric to valiantly manage his guests with the aid of a couple of distinctly odd locals. 

The usual motley assortment thus land upon the island's distant shores, loners, mostly, each with some baggage in tow or some social graces left behind, and they hunker down on this moody, wintry, and slightly eerie place and proceed to get to know one another and some peculiar locals, as there's simply nothing else to do. And A.T.E. works her magic on them.

Among the unlikely alliances formed amongst the five guests, are Jessica, a jaded and fairly famous actress who is a household voice and face of soap and tea-bag advertisements and the like, and widower Harry, the "disciplined and tidy" ex-military man who "had been sad for almost as long as he could remember". But then, they should be naturally drawn to one another as Jessica is to find herself a potential murder victim on the island, and Harry is constantly ruminating on and longing for his own death. It is his admiration of General Gordon and his envying him his early death that, finding himself in a purposeless existence, Harry starts writing his biography. 

General Charles Gordon in Khartoum

Luckily, I had read Lytton Strachey's The Victorians immediately before I first read The Inn and was well and truly boned up on General Gordon, so it was with delight that I greeted his appearances in the book as an old friend:

    'Don't cry,' said Harry.

    'I'm so sorry,' said Jessica. 'Men hate tears.'

    'I don't mind,' said Harry. 'I don't like to see you upset.' He would have told her that he himself sometimes wept, but he knew that women cannot bear to see men weep. 'How about a brandy?'

    'And soda?' said Jessica, attempting to substitute a smile for a snivel. 'Drink to General Gordon?'

    'Why not?' said Harry. 'He was an amazing fellow for looking on the bright side.'

    'I suppose he'd need to be,' said Jessica. 'Stuck in Khartoum like that. I've nearly gone mad stuck on Crewe platform for an hour – and nobody was proposing to massacre me.'

    'I know something to cheer you up,' said Harry. 'I'll read you some last words.'

    'Thanks a lot,' said Jessica, drying her tears.

And later on, after a goodly dose of her holiday reading, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a depressed Jessica turns to Harry for a restorative tonic:

    'Harry,' said Jessica, at the door of his room, 'could I have a B and S?' She made no apology.

    'You don't look well,' observed Harry.

    'I'm all right,' she said. 'Only I've just been reading about Hell again. I think nineteenth-century Hell is probably worse than the Hell of other ages – ... I know what today feels like. It feels like a Protestant's Sunday. No joy. Worse – a reminder of Hell. I shan't try and skip Christmas again, it isn't worth it.'

    'Gordon was good on hell,' said Harry. 'Shall I tell you?'

    'Will it cheer me up?' asked Jessica.

    'It might,' said Harry.

    'I'm not sure if I'm frightened of death or Hell,' said Jessica, 'or both, or neither, or whether I've merely got indigestion, or maybe I was last incarnated in some Victorian villa with bad drains, and I can't shake the memory off. Tell me about Gordon and Hell.'"

    Harry turned to his notes ...

The other dubious pairing is between Ronald and Anita. Ronald is a self-centred psychoanalyst, "a single-minded, foraging creature intent on a goal imperceptible to others" whose long-suffering wife and cleaning lady both have finally left him and whose utter flailing about domestically has forced him to take lodgings over Christmas at the edge of the world in order that he might get fed and watered. 

Anita the lonely and insecure spinster in charge of stationery in a big store, who yearns for elegance and taste (and love), was foisted with nauseating festive offerings by her impossible buyer this year. In silent protest and a surprising act of defiance, she chooses an anti-Christmas escape, imaging the remote hotel to provide a chic retreat from all the wrong notes being hit by the tasteless, peopled with the like-minded. While her ideals are merely that, and, despite his ungracious demeanour, the slightly desperate Anita finds herself automatically responding to Ronald's apparent need for female guidance.

    'Are you more or less ready, Ronald?' asked Anita.

    'What for?' asked Ronald.

    'You are coming with me,' explained Anita patiently, 'to talk to a lady I met, who knits special sweaters with a special pattern so that when her husband and sons get drowned she can identify the bodies.'

    'Oh yes, of course,' said Ronald. 'I remember now. I said I'd come with you, didn't I?'

    'Yes,' said Anita. 'You did.'

    'I'll go and get my coat,' said Ronald after a short silence, illustrative of some reluctance.

    'You can't spend the morning pigging crisps and nuts in the bar,' said Anita on a sudden surge of gaiety.

    So that's the way the wind's blowing, thought Eric. For she had sounded quite like a wife in a not unreasonable humour.

The fifth wheel in the non-Christmas assemblage is Jon. A minor actor, young, vain and handsome, and clearly mad. He is obsessed with Jessica, with whom he shares an agent and who cannot quite remember him or understand his giving attention to her, and stalks her to the edge of the world with goodness know's what intention. Well ... ultimately, murder. Sorry! Spoilers abound around these pages.

    'Schmuck,' said Ronald as Jon left the room, and Jessica was briefly diverted by this evidence of a different aspect to a character she thought she had summed up. He's human, she thought. Anita, however, found his remark lacking in dignity and professional finesse.

    'He's unbalanced,' she reminded the psychoanalyst. 'He needs treatment.'

    'He's a schmuck,' repeated Ronald stubbornly. Jon had reminded him of his least favourite patient, and by association, of the wifeless, cold and foodless house to which he must soon return. There was, he thought self-pityingly, nothing more depressed than a depressed psychoanalyst, for no one else was so familiar, by way of observation and practice, with the subtle gradations and bleak possibilities of this melancholy state. He took the remains of a once-hot roll from Anita's plate and piled jam on it – an act which could be construed as displaying a heart-warming familiarity and ease of manner, or a lack of any knowledge of social decorum whatsoever. Anita couldn't make up her mind.

Which reminds me, there was a bit of plainspeaking over at Samuel Pepys's diary yesterday, too. "But my Lord Mayor I find to be a talking, bragging Bufflehead ... when in discourse I observe him to be as very a coxcomb as I could have thought had been in the City." &c. &c. and concluding, "I am confident there is no man almost in the city cares a turd for him, nor hath he brains to outwit any ordinary tradesman." But I digress ...

Like any good formula for a book, throw together an odd assembly in a remote location and just see what happens. Add some Celtic lore, in the form of Selkies, and perhaps some ghosts and you have the perfect preternatural Christmas getaway for our not-quite Famous Five. And because I cannot resist spoilers, five go out but only three will return! Make this a Christmas read, or get in early as a just any old time of the year read and I will be disappointed if you don't find it entertaining.

Image credits: 1, 3: Flying With Hands; 2: Wikimedia Commons: 4: via Pinterest