A Fatal Inversion - more

Guilt is an insidious, corrosive thing. I once knew a therapist who had two mantras: suffering is optional and guilt is unnecessary. Except it isn't, most of the time -- guilt and the desire not to feel it is what keeps most of us more or less moral. In other words, it is what passes for conscience.

Donna Tartt's wonderful The Secret History looked at what happens to people when they do in fact get away with murder. The result isn't pretty -- each of the students of the swish college who was part of the killing of Bunny went awry in some way. It is a kind of judeo-christian view of things, isn't it? Because what the theme suggests is that we know when we've done wrong, we expect to be punished for it and sliding by upsets the natural order of things.

Interestingly, A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) has a similar theme. In her version, though, it's not so much getting away with murder that's the problem, it's not knowing how long you are going to get away with it, and that's the trick when doing bad things. It's a ticking time bomb and sooner or later, someone's going to blow it for you.

The characters in Inversion are all thieves -- one steals the mansion from his father when he could as easily share it; another steals for the sake of it; a third steals the oxygen out of the room through her utter dullness, yet another steals whatever he can, be it a heart or a soul or his wife's time. At one point a baby is stolen, and dies and then murder is committed to cover up this sorry fact. The only one who seems to get away with it in any real sense is the most mad of the characters, who somehow seems to come into her own after the deed is done.

But for the nutter, the fragile psyche who stole a baby out of some post-partum fit of madness, each of the characters then goes on to live an abbreviated life, a quashed life. The energy it takes to keep the lid on things, to prevent any loved one from opening it, to stay hidden, ultimately kills the soul in all of them. So, no one actually gets away with murder. Not the dead, and not the living. To paraphrase a well-known convict, in murder "everybody dies." And in keeping secrets, partaking in the shimmy-shamy, the flim-flam, the cover up, the endless compromises of keeping lies hidden, in living the half-life of feeling guilty -- well, in that case, everybody dies as well.