Another book that’s been on my shelves for at least 15 years is Talk of the Devil by Frank Baker [image on left from Fantastic Fiction]. It’s no secret that his earlier novel Miss Hargreaves is all all-time best-beloved book, but I’ve had mixed-to-negative reactions to all the other novels I’ve read by him. Will Talk of the Devil be any different?
Spoilers: not really. But let’s keep on.
The narrator, Philip, has headed to Cornwall, an area that Baker particularly loved, to visit a couple of old friends – Paul Acton and Jeremy Holden. And Baker is good on descriptions of Cornwall – here’s what he says about St Zenac, which isn’t a real place but is a wonderfully Cornish name:
‘It is a place so much on the edge of unreality, you can never decide where myth ends and history begins. Wild moorland, with massive stacks of granite clutched by lichen; streams that trickle secretly to the sea; the raven, the buzzard, the viper; and in little ravines, soft mounds of sweet turf where bladder-campion and thrift grow in rich masses. It is a country too ancient to be safe. The few farming people, in wind-swept stone cottages, are a troglodyte race, stunted in growth, with thick burry voices. Antiquarians, geologists, archaeologists, and novelists – all have written about this last edge of England, once called Bolerium. And those who have come under the spell of it invariably have to return to it; to return to the last sweeping fire of the falling sun as it sinks beyond the Atlantic, the death of day in England.’
I think Baker is at his best in Talk of the Devil when writing about Cornwall – the landscape and also the feelings it evokes. This is very near the beginning of the book, and I was filled with hope. But…
The actual plot of Talk of the Devil is rather more confusing. While Philip is visiting, he hears about the death of Gladys Acton – which many locals believe was the result of dark supernatural forces, though officially she died of natural causes.
”Because she was murdered in such a way that there could never be any evidence. Because, in fact, she was murdered by the power of malicious thought, bent upon her end. And shall I tell you why I’m so interested, Jeremy? Because people can be, and are being destroyed without any material force being employed. You don’t need guns in this game. Simply the collective power of evil. And especially for unfortunate people like Gladys Acton, who have enough integrity and determination to get in the way.”
The above is the sort of conversation a lot of people have, and Philip spends quite a lot of the novel trying to establish the nature of evil, and determine whether or not there is such a person as the devil.
Baker often looks to the metaphysical in his books. In Miss Hargreaves, a significant element of the novel explores the power of creative thought – being sufficient to make a fictional person come alive. It works there, because it is an undercurrent to a very funny and enjoyable narrative, and it is attached to a very concrete example. In Talk of the Devil, as elsewhere in his other novels, Baker gets too tangled up in philosophical and metaphysical conversations without enough surface story to make them compelling.
I found myself quite confused by Talk of the Devil. It was enjoyable enough to read, but it hovered between a rather flimsy thriller and something with more sophisticated, but more baffling, aims. Putting together a treatise on the nature of evil with a murder mystery sounds quite promising, but the tangle didn’t ever really become disentangled.
If this were the first novel I’d read by Baker, I’d probably give it a lukewarm appreciation. It’s certainly not poorly written on a prose level, even if the construction isn’t wonderful. But I start each Baker novel with the hope that, finally, I might have found a worthy successor to the wondrous Miss Hargreaves. Maybe after 15 years I have to acknowledge that lightning struck once. But more likely, I’ll keep slowly reading his books, hoping for that second miracle.
I intend to write about each of the British Library Women Writers titles as they come out, though I’m already a bit behind because the brilliant Father by Elizabeth von Arnim is also out now!