Brief note: a juxtaposition

Emma Jane Worboise's anti-Tractarian and anti-Catholic Helen Bury: Or, the Errors of My Early Life (1850) and Jim Crace's thoroughly secular historical novel The Signals of Distress (1995) are two novels that appear to have nothing in common, and yet their respective approaches to disaster prove, I think, telling.  Helen Bury's last name turns out to prefigure her career, which sees her burying her parents, her aunt, her sister-in-law, her husband, her best friend, and both her children, along with (figuratively) herself.  But this sequence of burials, along with her husband's financial undoing at the hands of an evil Catholic  attorney, has nothing random about it.  In fact, given the novel's controversial subject matter, this cavalcade of death and disaster is only what the reader expects; once the narrator converts first to Tractarian views and then to Roman Catholicism--a transformation represented as itself an inevitable shift--she exposes herself to divine discipline.  Emily, Helen's friend, warns that "if you be not induced to return by gentle means, a kind and loving Father will use sterner methods, and a storm will arise--one that may so desolate your way, that like the dove of Noah, you may find no resting place for the sole of your foot, and may so return to the ark of safety" (130).  This proves to be the key to organizing the novel's events, albeit a key visible only in retrospect: even after returning to Protestantism, Helen must be stripped of all those she loves on earth, the better to rest in God's love.   There is no suspense about either the ending or Helen's eventual renewal; indeed, the novel's point is that any suspense about Helen's future vanished the moment that she took the momentous step of following her husband-to-be (her "idol") into Catholicism.*  Only her fall into Catholicism blinded her to the "obvious" consequences of her decision. Thus, the narrative ultimately expands from personal memoir to universal pattern--the necessary plotline for anyone misguided enough to fall for the Catholic snare.  "If these pages fall into the hands of any readers, young and inexperienced, and untaught by the blessed Spirit, as I once was, and treading the verge of religious error," Helen exhorts her audience at the end, "may such readers be led, by their perusal, to search for themselves the Holy Scripture, and to test by its quenchless lamp the truth of those tenets, which by persuasions or other causes, they may be about to embrace.  Then, not in vain shall I have recorded THE ERRORS OF MY EARLY LIFE" (254-55). Helen writes her own past so that readers may view and avert their possible future, largely by turning from one text (the book in front of them) to another (the Word itself). 

By contrast, like most contemporary neo-Victorian novels, The Signals of Distress constructs a world in which suffering serves no purpose and has no spiritual referent.  This is a small town/small village novel, and as is frequently the case in such tales, the clash of provincial insider and more cosmopolitan outsider results in considerable trauma for all concerned.  Two lines intersect in the rather wretched seaside village of Wherrytown: Aymer Smith (his aim is pretty terrible), a schlemiel-type comic liberal, and Captain Comstock, a grumpy American captain.  Aymer's specialty lies in the imagination, an ability to "put right in his mind's eye things that might go wrong in life" (245), and the detailed plots he concocts consistently collapse under the weight of circumstances and his own ineptitude.  Murphy's Law runs rampant for poor Aymer: he ticks off most of the populace, wanders around without pants, has inappropriate fantasies about various women, and, in general, makes himself unwelcome.  He does manage to liberate Comstock's slave, Otto--with what result, we never find out.  By the end of the novel, thanks to a series of unfortunate events, he has not only suffered multiple personal and professional disasters, but has also undergone a truly horrific beating, thanks to the influence of local fixer Walter Howells.  Comstock, who also falls prey to Howells, will get his comeuppance--along with a number of other people who clearly have done nothing to deserve it.  This is a world in which villains (or, at least, Neutral Evil types) prosper without fear of justice, while less effective people (dupes or otherwise) bear the weight of the pain.  There is no God here--except, perhaps, for the author--and no promise that things could be put right in the future; indeed, given the brutal ending, there is no future self-awareness at all for most of the characters.  The inevitability of the novel's events derives not from a spiritual economy of sin and punishment, but from the literary economy of black comedy.  In some ways, The Signals of Distress offers what could be a Victorian plot, but without the providential underpinning that would stabilize it, make its disasters significant. 

*--Given Worboise's more overt engagements with Jane Eyre elsewhere, it's possible to read this novel as a sideways assault on JE's fairy-tale narrative.  Like Jane, Helen treats her husband as an "idol," but the relationship cannot be reconstituted on earth after Herbert turns back to Protestantism--he still has to die, for his punishment and Helen's.