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With the exception of her introduction to the upcoming Penguin U.K.
selection of M. R. James ghost stories, The Means of Escape is
Fitzgerald's farewell to us. Both of a piece with the rest of her work
and not, these stories embody the meticulous attention to detail, the
realistic and believable humor of her characters, and the refusal to
falsify reality for the sake of a "happy ending" that mark her novels.
Even so, two of these eight tales can only be called ghost stories, a
fact which surprised me even though "The Bookshop" prominently features a
ghost. There, however, the ghost was a part of the fabric of the whole
tale, as mundane--one might say--as the drafty chill of centuries-old
houses and the soggy English climate. In "Desideratus" and "The Axe," on
the other hand, the "ghost" swells as it were until he is the tale, as
the case must be in a true ghost story. "The Axe," a "classic" ghost
story in the M. R. James sense, nonetheless manages to update the
Jamesian creeping suspense and bring it into a contemporary corporate
setting, a feat which roots the horror in the everyday, somewhat as does
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." The story succeeds completely and may
be Fitzgerald's earliest fiction--I gather at least that it predates all
of her novels.
 "Desideratus" is one of several of these tales set in the past, but the
manner of its presentation is perhaps more "modern," or even post-modern,
than any other story here. In fact, before I realized that I should see
it as a ghost story, I considered it an unusual--for Fitzgerald, that
is--experiment in Borgesian "other"ness. Fitzgerald does not present
the ghost--as I am calling him--as such, but rather suggests that he is
a double of the story's protagonist, a poor seventeenth century boy named
Jack Digby. His unexplained presence--in a household which avowedly has
no children--is most like Borges, but so too is the almost throwaway
nature of the denouement, which still bears Fitzgerald's unmistakable
stamp.
The other six tales inhabit the commonsense and matter-of-fact world of
Fitzgerald's novels and are notably distinct from them primarily in
ranging farther afield. As a novelist, Fitzgerald moved beyond England
to Russia, Germany and Italy but, still, six or her nine novels take
place entirely or mostly in England. Four of the eight stories here are
set in New Zealand, Turkey or France, and a fifth moves from England to a
small island off the coast of Scotland. The two New Zealand stories are
the volume's bookends--the title tale and "At Hiruharama." These most
closely resemble Fitzgerald's novels in the relatively old-fashioned way
in which the plots move forward. One can easily see in "The Means of
Escape" a novel in miniature, or a novella trimmed down to short story
length by excision of everything not absolutely demanded by the central
narrative. The protagonist Alice Godley is both complex and surprising,
to herself as well as to the reader, and the world as Fitzgerald presents
it through Alice's eyes, is full of degrees of relative guilt and
innocence, with no sharp blacks and whites. Part of the humor, of
course, lies in Fitzgerald's very nineteenth-century usage of names--
Alice is a minister's daughter who carries out some decidely ungodly
business [or is it?] in connection with an escaped murderer who plans to
flee New Zealand on a ship called "Constancy." In such a vessel, can he
do other than betray her trust?
"At Hiruharama," staged as the telling of a family history, features a
forebear who settled down in far rural New Zealand because he could not
afford land nearer to any city. The circumstances of the story--and
thus the future existence embodied in the teller--repeatedly turn on
such unplanned and unwanted exigencies. One makes do, in effect, with
what one has, and thus are a life and its consequences played out.
These stories are so economically and intelligently told that they
almost read themselves. The title story, longest at eighteen pages,
makes up almost one-fifth of the whole, and one is well-advised to read
only one or two at a sitting. Otherwise the entire book will be gulped
down in not much more than an hour, and one will realize belatedly that
he has left himself nowhere to turn for more Fitzgerald, except in
rereading.
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