A Fatal Attachment

Robert Barnard's wonderful books fall into two rough periods. His earlier books were primarily social satires, ripping pretensions and class pomposity right and left. They also happened to be good mysteries, but that was secondary. His later books--roughly from Death and the Chaste Apprentice on--have been less about satire and more about the difficulties and small tragedies everyone, of every class, must face. This book, A Fatal Attachment, includes both. The chief protagonist, and victim, Lydia Perceval, is a smart, manipulative, ruthless, self-deluded snob--who "appropriates" others' children to mold them into the Romantic heroes she dreams of, but destroys everyone in the process. The portrait of her and the harm she does is biting; but--like all Barnard's portraits--also sympathetic (though not forgiving). She gets her comeuppance in a way that no one could have foreseen. You have to wait till the very last four sentences to realize just how unexpected, and how karmic, her fate is. The other characters are all more sympathetically dealt with, and all form a complex picture of parental-vs.-sibling rivalries, and class-vs.-personal conflicts. A masterful study of a small town in England, and a brilliant portrait of its people and of universal loss and redemption.