Summit
Review by Walter Cummins
I was more than half way through The Kindness of Strangers before I realized Emma Garman’s real subject in this novel, the uncertainty of identity. Until then I thought she was accumulating clues to a unique mystery set in post-war 1950s London—less a who-dun-it than a why-dun-it.
All of Part I seems focused on that question, primarily because of the shocking opening of a concise prologue set five weeks after the chronological story begins. This flash-forward culmination is told from the perspective of a dying Jimmy Sullivan surrounded by the other residents of Honor Wilson’s boarding house, hinting at a collective of murderers not unlike those of an Agatha Christie novel. So many questions are raised by that brief scene. The first half of Garman’s novel is devoted to establishing who Jimmy is and why people would want him dead. Thus, I expected the steps of a solution to fill the pages ahead: an answer to how and why a group of housemates conspired.
Instead, despite a number of Christie-like echoes, solving a crime is not Garman’s primary interest. The murder turns out to be a cover for what the novel is really about—not Jimmy as victim. Instead he is much more a catalyst, his sudden and suspicious arrival in Honor Wilson’s house the starting point for making each resident’s discoveries about the others’ pasts more and more urgent. To explore the lives of the people who witnessed his dying, the novel advances through a series of developing relationships and penetrating conversations. What they expose are the secrets of identity—what people are holding back and what they didn’t even know about themselves.
Honor Wilson, the landlady, inherited the house at the death of her decades older publisher husband. She stays in the literary field by issuing a magazine, Vista. Two of the other residents assist her in that project. Saul Reznikov, an east European poet, is a handsome middle-aged displaced man who lost his wife and daughter in the Holocaust. Robbie Trafford is a young Cambridge graduate who reads submissions that he finds weak, certainly inferior to the novels he dreams of writing but never does. He also is separated from his wife, Pamela. The other two residents are women. George, actually Georgina Mountford-Owen, is a beautiful well-born child of an upper-class family, but estranged from parents and sisters, earning her expense money as an artists’ model. Tina, just eighteen, works as a movie theatre usher, her first job as she has left her suburban family to start a London life.
So far this information is what the residents know and discover about each other. That turns out not to be the half of it. In part, several of the residents have been secreting much about who they are and what they have done, secrets finally exposed through the presence of Jimmy and where he fits in. In Part I many of these details emerge during conversations among the residents, usually two at a time, planned or spontaneous.
Part II is very different. The residents know Jimmy’s body is buried in the yard; but as far as the authorities are concerned, he is missing, sought because he has fled the investigation of a series of crimes. The policeman in charge, Detective Inspector Hilary Comyns, is aware of crimes in which certain residents were involved and which could lead to jail sentences. Comyns plays on these vulnerabilities in hope of getting each to testify against others.
While that pace of revelations in Part I could be called cumulative, step by step, those of Part II pour out one after another, some from Detective Comyns, but many of the most startling from family members, disrupting long-held assumptions about family relationships and the resulting upheavals about who is connected to whom. The result is Dickensian discoveries of deep linkages between the high and the low, the rich and the poor.
The chaos of these confessions spills out at almost a comic pace, often making it difficult to keep track of parentage and bonds and the plot implications of so many complications. Garman has shifted techniques to undermine any sense of certainly about identities that seemed clear in Part I.
While Part II concludes with a surprise clarification of how Jimmy was killed, a brief Epilogue reveals what happened to the central characters after the Jimmy events, covering the thirty years from the 1950s to the 1980s. Despite criminality, no one ended up in prison. Instead, the former residents went on new circumstances and lived orderly lives. Even Detective Comyns, after retirement, became part of the group. The resident who went on to the greatest success—international fame and fortune—turns out to be the one who plunged the fatal knife into Jimmy, not an act of murder but a desperate lunge to stop him from killing another person. By the 1980s Jimmy’s brief weeks among them is a distant past for the survivors of Mrs. Wilson’s rooming house, his criminal file deep in dust in some insignificant police basement.
Garman’s has confounded readers with one surprise after another, revealing unknowns they hadn’t even imagined existed.
