Rustication

In Rustication, Charles Palliser (probably still best known for his neo-Victorian doorstop The Quincunx) mashes up multiple Victorian genres and authors.  Both the conceit--it's a "real" manuscript transcribed by "Charles Palliser"--and the main setting, a run-down isolated mansion near marshes and woodlands, are quintessential Gothic.  However, the twisty plot, which involves murderous machinations over a will, poison pen letters, mutilated animals, blackmail, multiple red herrings, and lots of illicit sex, owes more to the sensation novel; for that matter, the adolescent narrator's coming-of-age through detection resembles that of the (much older) protagonist in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret.  By contrast, the detective who appears to investigate the murders comes across a bit like Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff from The Moonstone, and the narrative form (a diary interspersed with letters) is also Collins-esque. The opium-addicted narrator, Richard Shenstone, bears some resemblance (probably unintentional) to Branwell Bronte, and one of the supporting characters has a backstory that strongly resembles that of Helen Graham from Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (and is subjected to similarly nasty gossip).  The reader is thus primed to suspect that something is afoot.  

As the novel begins, Richard Shenstone, our seventeen-year-old narrator, has been "rusticated"--expelled--from Cambridge University under mysterious circumstances, which apparently include the death of a friend and a mysterious debt to that friend's family; the precise circumstances are not revealed until near the end of the book.  Snobbish, selfish, unsympathetic to others, prone to (incorrect) snap judgments, and frequently incapable of deciphering those around him, Richard would already be marked for unreliable narrator-hood even before the reader gets to his opium habit, his perpetual horniness, and his disinclination to refer to his past at Cambridge.  Richard's mysteriousness, however, is immediately echoed by his mysterious reception when he returns home: why does his mother call him "Willy?" Why was his sister dressed up? And why are neither of them excited to see him? The moment of mutual misrecognition between Richard and his mother--"For a moment she recognised me no better than I had recognised her" (4)--establishes a gap between parent and child that echoes through the narrative.  In the frightening, disorienting possibility that a mother might not know her son, and a son not know his mother, we find one of the novel's prime sources of terror: that the nuclear family may not be an organic, stable site of identity, that returning "home" merely makes things strange.  The Shenstones' puzzling poverty, which turns out to derive from a sexual scandal involving Richard's deceased clergyman father (the reader will figure out what the problem was long before Richard does), is only further proof that parents and children are locked in mutual unknowing.  Most of the vulgar poison pen letters in fact involve ribald accusations lobbed at the "best" families about a child's known or secret sexual activity, a mother's literal or figurative attempt to "hore" [sic] out a child to get her wedded, incest, and so forth; the nuclear family turns out to be positively rank with transgressive lusts that refuse to stay safely confined within the bounds of marriage, the right parent-child relationship, and so forth.   But do the parents and children know the family secrets, if secrets they truly are?

About a third of the way through the book, Richard's mother threatens him with a "revelation" if he refuses to decamp immediately, to which Richard responds by backing down and promising to "go away" (85).  Richard's decision to refuse "revelation," a word which crops up several times in the narrative, makes keeping family secrets the precondition for having any sort of future plot--to know means that you've arrived at the ending (appropriately enough).  In fact, when Richard does accept "revelation," it frequently leads to some kind of sudden reorientation towards another character or event--"[t]his revelation throws a new light on Lucy" (132)--that often leads to abrupt, premature conclusions that are just as much about self-delusion as they are self-knowledge.  His "revelation" about young Lucy's personality, for example, prompts him to write "Beautiful creature, I have fallen into the waters of love and drowned in the deep brown of your eyes" (132)--an outburst of cliched passion that has no actual relationship either to Lucy or to his own actual feelings (which are permanently confused).  

But "know" and its cognates, which appear hundreds of times, carry an even greater burden. Early on, Richard asks the innocent question "[d]oes Mrs. Paytress know Lord Thurchester?" (20), which turns out to be an accidental pun--the local gossip is that Mrs. Paytress (the Helen Huntingdon stand-in) does indeed know Lord Thurchester in both senses of the term.  Knowing in this novel tends to be slippery, disavowed as often as avowed; it promises certainty, but often occurs in the negative (why did "the Lloyds pretend not to know us?" [22]) or as an expression of puzzlement ("How is it that Euphemia knows the word?" [39]; "I don't know why the mater has hired a cook who can't cook" [52]).  When Richard insists that his sister Euphemia didn't "know what she saw on my face" when her twelve-year-old self caught him watching her take her clothes off (6), the reader cannot help suspecting that he is being disingenuous--not least because Euphemia will take advantage of her brother's incestuous desires later on.  Richard's growing interest in detection, which propels him toward knowledge, also propels him toward the terror of domestic strangeness that I mentioned before.   His habit of jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence, as when he concludes that the local nobleman, Davenant Burgoyne, has "proposed marriage" to his sister (94) or that Mrs. Paytress is indeed carrying on an illicit affair with both Lord Thurchester and her servant (197-98), parodies the "eureka moment" beloved of so many detective plots, but it also prevents the narrative from concluding.  In a way, the entire novel consists of Richard trying to come to multiple false endings, all of which divert him from the horror of the true ending, which will sever him from his family altogether.

I'd like to talk about the major plot twist, so I'll put the rest of this post below the fold.  Abandon all hope, etc.