You
probably have to go as far back as the Brontes to find three women having as
dysfunctionally miserable a time of it in the uplands of the north as Margot,
Mama and Eden, the bizarre love triangle at the heart of Lucy Rose’s The Lamb.
First a
disclaimer: I’m prejudiced against serial killers. Time was, the better class of murder involved
the violation of complex knots of financial, familial or sexual obligations;
betrayal, intrigue, the deep roots of personal and social dysfunction,
long-hidden animosities and ancient or tribal hatreds. Then along came the serial killer, blown in
from the anonymous, asocial wildernesses of the Empty Quarter of America, at
just the moment that Margaret Thatcher announced there was no such thing as
‘society’ and the value of a life was reduced to its position – or lack of one
- in the marketplace. The age of consumer
entitlement made the psychopathology of the compulsive killer the focus, and
murder fiction became a sort of action-painting. At its worst, plot became a crossword puzzle
to be cracked by ticking boxes and recognizing patterns not meanings. At its best, a tool for the dissection of the
enflamed horrors of the human soul. The
interiority of the killer, not the social relations of the victim, became the
focus of narrative discovery. (I exclude from this opinion the work of the
excellent Patricia Cornwell, whose Scarpetta is, throughout, a deeply political
figure).*
What Rose
does in The Lamb is take that interiority to a new level, if only
because she brings the intense social relations of the killers’ family romance
into play, and watches unspeakable horror play out through the eyes of a not-that-innocent
child.
The Lamb is, at its most basic – and it is
about basic urges, no doubt – a sort of post-feminist eating-disorder retelling
of Sawney Bean, the Galloway cannibal who lurked in the darkness at the edge of
Renaissance Scotland. Here the family
occupy a cottage somewhere anonymously remote in the Cumbrian fells (it’s
probably no coincidence that Cumbria is currently a serious foodie destination,
with 13 Michelin-starred restaurants and many more adorning the Good Food
Guide), though a convenient bus-ride away from Margot’s school, which she
continues to attend without care-workers batting an eyelash while the culinary
horrors play out at the other end of the line in broken Britain. The route between these two worlds, from the
oppression of the mundane to the horror of the underworld, is important: its overseen by the driver of the school bus, and it says
a lot for Rose’s adeptness with ambiguity that we can never be quite sure
whether he is genuinely concerned for Margot’s wellbeing – or subtly grooming
her.
All
journeys into the world of childhood enchantment begin with the absence of the
father, and the identity & whereabouts of Margot’s are subjects of
persistent mystery and reticence. (There’s an early clue to Margot’s own
withholding of information from us in a family of rampant appetites when they
have the local gamekeeper – father of one of Margot’s schoolfriends – for
dinner and the identity of exactly which body-part Margot consumes is coyly
elided in a way reminiscent of how we’re never quite told exactly what
Heathcliff actually does with the exhumed body of Catherine Earnshaw).
Release
from this double hell comes when Margot reaches puberty. I’ll maintain my own reticence on the details
of the denouement, but will say that while there is a pitiless logic to the plotline
– the astute may have seen it coming for some time – the voice and viewpoint by
which it is transmitted raises some deep
questions for the reader. Have we, after
all, been participating in a fictional abuse memoire (well, yeah,
unavoidably)? And the continuation of
Margot’s voice by other means implies the omniscience of eternity, quite the
shift after the relentlessly visceral, corporeally messy details of the narrative.
*Fun fact: I had the good fortune, many years ago, to study creative writing under Anthony Abbott at Davidson College, a year or two after Cornwell had graced his seminars. Tony's influence and encouragement had a profound effect upon my own work.