The Price of Deceit

...It is a consequence Joseph aptly explains in the version of King Lear he gives for May's benefit that evening...

...Lionel pretends as long as possible that they are a perfect pair of turtle-doves, and coos "sweetheart" at her throughout the novel...

...When as a boy he once had to hunt rabbits, "he closed his eyes lest he should see what he did...

...Not that the author was ever long-winded, but she has a fine ear and previously has exhibited an enjoyment of dialogue for its own sake...

...everything works toward a clearly-defined end...

...For one thing, this book has obviously been pared down, pruned of excess verbiage...

...Still, Balfour does have a certain perceptiveness: "Behind everything they said lay something else, another meaning altogether...

...She was huge and vicious with hunger, but . . . refrained from eating even a piece of bread...

...Or take his view of his drinking habits: "Though he wouldn't call himself a teetotaller, he wasn't a drinking man —or hadn't been until his marriage to May...

...Not even, he might have added, to themselves...

...He's perfectly intelligent and normal, but he can't communicate...

...He found that a small drink gave him the uplift he needed...

...And so it comes about that Roland finally persuades Kidney to accompany him up the mountain...

...Roland says he knows the one about Abraham...

...Yet for all her many faults, she is not a complete fool...

...He is right, of course, although Joseph tells himself that "the child will have forgotten the whole idea...

...He doesn't believe in God...

...All his life, Lionel has refused to face up to facts...

...Shut your trap...

...No one really expected him to go for them—it was just to make him feel big and busy while they finished their chat...

...Tomorrow,' he said, stroking the child's head, 'I'm going to take you up the mountain...

...Out of season, and out of sorts, one is tempted to add...

...He suffers from acne, and from strange seizures, and he stammers, especially under stress...

...Joseph does not realize how precisely this analysis applies to him...

...Similarly, Roland: "He didn't have to get those twigs for the fire...

...May," he says, and the words fall like an axe...

...Admittedly, Dotty is something of a slob...

...Only at the very end, when he discovers her cruelest prank, does his mask fall...

...This pattern of letting half-truths gather dangerous momentum, somewhat the way sand bluffs become landslides, is typical of Bainbridge's subtle and powerful character portrayals...

...But it is on Joseph, the master self-deceiver, that the main plot hinges...

...They had cut themselves free from all that (loyalty, family ties), gone out on a limb...

...her insights are tinged with a self-irony that sets her apart from her companions...

...When he discovers Roland dead, he is distressed at how little he is moved...

...Here the dialogue is not naturalistic...

...Out of season, Bainbridge gathers together seven adults and two children in a holiday camp in woodsy Wales...

...She, too, falls short of total frankness, however, and in addition is irritatingly addicted to Monopoly, a game involving much pretense and make-believe...

...After a pause he shouts, "My dad wouldn't sacrifice me...

...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review" Beryl Bainbridge's Another Part of the Wood is a small, precise study of small, insidious deceits—mainly self-deceits...

...The two older women cast sidelong glances at him in an effort to regain their tattered self-esteem, but he is not equal to their dreams...

...Of her remaining characters, two seem almost extraneous to the plot of this otherwise condensed book, and the third, Balfour, serves as a link between the world of childhood and adulthood...

...While they are walking, Kidney tells Roland Bible stories involving mountains...

...She is artfully creating a Fiction, and the sum, by virtue of being less, has become beautifully more than its parts...

...They didn't really feel they belonged to anyone anymore...

...He's just mentally blocked...

...They had such tolerance...

...From what one knows of Bainbridge's past work, though, one can hazard some observations about her development...

...Bainbridge is doing something in this book that was not apparent in her earlier novels...

...It was an accident, but his fault...

...Just you and me.'" But the next day Roland "supposed it wasn't much use telling Joseph it had stopped raining...

...They know how isolated they are, and are aware of the deception being practiced upon them...

...Joseph didn't want to take him up the mountain...

...If an atmosphere is established, it is part of the statement...

...But their triviality does not bar them from exacting tragic prices...

...There was something wrong in it all...

...Unfortunately the first version, published in England about seven years ago, is not available in this country...

...No detail is accidental...

...The children, by contrast, are still undamaged...

...The trip ends in Roland's death...

...When the rules of Monopoly are waived for Kidney, "he knew he was playing alone...

...it would be fascinating as well as instructive to be able to compare the two editions...

...May truly despises Lionel and taunts him beyond endurance...

...He is already disenchanted with her...

...On the first day, Joseph makes a promise to himself that he repeats to his son as he is putting him to bed...

...Boredom, triviality, insensate chit-chat are so infused with evil that they rise to another plane...

...He arrives at the camp with his young son, Roland, on loan from his mother for this vacation, and an older boy named Kidney, a retarded youth he has taken in out of liberal do-good sentiments swathed in psychojargon: "Kidney isn't simple...

...In a world where truth has passed out of human relationships, even the leaves on the trees seem unreal: They "glitter like glass...

...Hush, hush, sweetheart,' he said, rubbing her back with his knuckles, 'You'll soon be in beddy-byes.'" His conjugal lovemak-ing is somewhat oblique, owing to impotence, but he seeks to regale his spouse with titillating tales of one Lalla Rookh, "Priestess of the Temple of Love," while May "thinks about her mother and father and how long it was since she had last been to see them...

...It was as if they had all been plucked up out of nowhere and set down with the express purpose of being amusing or interesting or something, and they had all been found wanting...

...Lionel is as genial and fatuous as Santa Claus...

...Speaking of himself he says, "There was no depth to him, no value...

...Despite Joseph's stated intention of devoting himself to his child during the holiday, he also has brought along Dotty, his latest in what appears to be a series of mistresses...

...But Balfour is damaged too...

...It is as if the occasional insights Bainbridge's people muster are useless to them in their own lives, so thick is their armor of self-deception...

...Roland and Kidney have not yet learned to connive...

...There are, first of all, the two pairs of grown-ups, Lionel and May, Joseph and Dotty...

...it does not seek so much to imitate class levels of speech (even if it does occasionally parody them), as to capture the quintessence of persons and states of being...

...When he finally did go off with his daughter, somebody killed her by mistake...

...Another Part of the Wood is a reworking of an earlier book...