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A hairbreadth decision, a lifetime lived under its shadow.


At the risk of turning this blog into 'The Claude Houghton Appreciation Society', herewith a fourth of his novels reprinted by Valancourt Books, 'A Hair Divides'.

https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2020/04/half-way-along-road-we-have-to-go-i.html https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/09/an-invitation-to-examined-life.html https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/08/who-is-jonathan-scrivener.html

Gordon Rutherford is an aspiring writer who in a split moment must decide whether or not to admit to the accidental death, in unlikely circumstances, of a recent acquaintance in fear that he will be accused of his murder. He decides not to, hiding the body, with fateful consequences. For twenty years, his undiscovered act follows him, reaping its ably described psychological consequences until an encounter with a third person, his acquaintance's female companion at the time, the book rolls to its denouement: with its potential for exposure, prosecution, and death - and yet hauntingly, in the end, a release into renewing freedom from the illusions of time.

The book's first half compellingly leads us to this hairbreadth decision, showing why Rutherford develops a compelling hatred of Feversham, his effortlessly accomplishing acquaintance, who has written a play, and how they come to the accident that will define his life (and why in retrospect Rutherford, at one point, imagines it could have been murder). Feversham is another portrait of one of Houghton's 'free people' whose spirit (for a never defined reason) always appears at once both more detached and yet engaged than others - as if freedom from bequeaths a real ability to be freedom to embody oneself, engage with, but not be drawn down into, the world.

The second half of the book, in a manner that reminds one of Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment', takes you into the labyrinthine ways that a person flees their memory, only to discover its hard-edged reality rebounding on you, burrowing away as conscience. It, also, takes you into that other, familiar Houghton territory of showing you how different are our readings of people. We all present differently in the varied consciousness of others; and, getting a clear, realistic view of anyone is endlessly complicated, complex.

There is too, often very tucked into the background, the 'mystical' that sense that there is a reality, freed of illusion, that we taste sometimes, but rarely have the presence of mind to make a wider home for it.

It is all expertly done. In addition, Houghton is an accomplished novelist of London. His descriptions of both the pre-War I, Edwardian society of 1910, and the post-War world of 1930 and the Depression are atmospheric, often acerbic, and compelling. I am delighted to have discovered him and appreciative of Valancourt Books efforts on his behalf.

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