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By Root 1039 0

two of the quartet (one his wife) are having an affair? ‘Don’t you see?’ Leonora roars at him during the fateful excursion to Marburg, ‘Don’t you see what’s going on?’, to which Dowell responds feebly, ‘No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?’ And if Dowell is as stupid as he appears to be, then his projection of Ashburnham as a wellnigh godly hero requires no further investigation. When he is not lamenting his ignorance, he’s regretting his gullibility – ‘But think of the fool that I was’ – and in conceding that Florence ‘had the seeing eye’, Dowell tells us (with redundant candour) that he has not. He only learns of Florence’s relationship with Ashburnham through a chance remark of Leonora’s soon after her husband’s funeral. Dowell also discovers that rather than dying of a strained heart, Florence committed suicide. ‘It had never entered my head. You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may consider me even to have been an imbecile. But consider my position.’ It is absolutely crucial that the reader does exactly that from the splendidly catchy outset of this novel to its unbelievably nonchalant end.

It should not amaze anyone that a man who appears to be so switched off from reality should be such an apparently inept narrator. ‘It is so difficult to keep all these people going’, Dowell complains near the end of the book, but. he has not helped himself by narrating his tale in a disjointed and misleading fashion. For instance, we are led to believe that Ashburnham’s pigskin travelling cases, all stamped ‘EFA’, epitomize his fastidious, old-world, slightly foppish, perfect-country-gentleman persona, but we subsequently discover that ‘they were Leonora’s manifestations’, given to him by the character whom we have otherwise been urged to identify only with the relentless enforcement of ‘economies’. Likewise, in Part Three, Chapter 4, Dowell tells us that Ashburnham’s ‘love-affairs, until the very end, were sandwiched in at odd moments or took place during the social evenings, the dances and dinners. But I guess I have made it hard for you, O silent listener, to get that impression.’ He also remarks with some pride in this same section that ‘I have generally found that my first impressions were correct enough,’ but this, pointedly, is only true ‘as far as waiters and chambermaids were concerned’. When faced with making sense of his own close circle or the world at large, Dowell is a good deal less reliable and has to apologize more than once for having conveyed the wrong impression. ‘I see that I have unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight,’ he observes, for example, in Part Two, Chapter 1. ‘Yet that was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come to think of it, she was out of my sight most of the time.’ Similarly, any reader who does ‘gather’ from Dowell’s ‘statement’ on the first page of the novel that the reason for his wife’s death was her ‘heart’ will absorb the wrong impression along with an ironic take on the truth. In Part One, Chapter 4, the narrator brings to mind an American city where ‘the blocks are all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to Thirtieth’, but the layout of his own story is altogether more obstructive. In fact, it is more like a labyrinth: with every page we turn, another dark passage lies before us. Some readers will regard Dowell’s narrative technique as perfectly suited to his gradual reconstruction of an imbroglio from which he was excluded; others will consider his mode of story-telling obfuscatory and entangling.

Dowell certainly makes it difficult for the reader to follow his tale, not only by failing to tell it chronologically, but also by digressing from it and loading it with a welter of geographical, topographical, cultural and personal asides. For instance, if his ‘anecdote’ in Part One, Chapter 2 about old Mr Hurlbird dispensing Californian oranges about the globe is briefly diverting in both senses of the word, to follow on from the