Corrigan, by Caroline Blackwood
Corrigan is a blackly comic novel about an encounter between a bereaved old woman and a persuasive but somewhat untrustworthy fast-talking Irishman in a wheelchair. I expected to love it. I didn’t.
Mrs Blunt is adrift after the death three years past of her husband, the Colonel. Her life revolved around him and depended on him; so much so that after he died she even had to learn how to write a check. She still can’t drive.
She lives quietly with the only highlight of her week being her visit to his grave. She barely eats. Her daughter, Nadine, lives in London in a seemingly perfect marriage. The two rarely talk.
Mrs Blunt’s life ended with the Colonel’s death. Now she’s just waiting for her own death – an inconveniently delayed coda.
She sees nobody save her working class Irish housekeeper Mrs Murphy. If Mrs Blunt is nearly a ghost, Mrs Blunt is all too alive:
Mrs Murphy never climbed Mrs Blunt’s stairs, she always stormed them like a military unit making a headlong charge to gain some useful vantage-point. She was very short and her squat body carried enormous weight. Yet she still moved around the house with a pointless but frenetic speed. When she charged up Mrs Blunt’s staircase, she always managed to make the carpet slippers that she wore, since shoes hurt her swollen feet, sound just as menacing as the running tread of regimental boots.
This drab and declining status quo changes one day when a thin Irishman comes wheeling up to the house raising funds for St Crispin’s care home. He explains that when he lost the use of his legs St Crispin’s looked after him and gave him a sense of purpose, as it does for others left maimed or disfigured. He now wheels door-to-door raising collections as while the home’s staff are skilled and compassionate its facilities are depressingly run-down and decrepit.
Corrigan is a persuasive fellow, loquacious and passionate. He refuses to take money from Mrs Blunt saying that he can’t take donations from a widow who must be struggling herself. It’s obvious though that she’s rich, and from that moment he cannily refuses her Mrs Blunt is hooked.
Nadine meanwhile has her own problems. Her husband Justin writes newspaper opinion pieces and appears at times on TV again spouting out his great and good opinions. Her two young children are wild and spoiled. Her life is a facade. She hardly ever speaks to her mother now, feeling excluded by the intensity of her mother’s grief:
[Nadine] felt that her mother was depriving her of her father in death, just as she had always seemed to deprive her of her father in life. The Colonel had always been very kind to Nadine. She couldn’t remember a single occasion when he’d ever been angry with her. But although he had treated her with courtesy and gentleness, he had given her a sense of defeat. All through her childhood she had endlessly striven to become the center of his affections, and she had always failed.
Isn’t that last sentence devastating?
Corrigan gets Mrs Blunt writing to another crippled man still resident at St Crispin’s, and she finds herself sharing her thoughts and feelings with this never-met correspondent in a way she’s so far been quite unable to do with anyone in person. She starts to question how little she does with her money and her remaining time, and decides that if Corrigan with nothing can wheel himself from house to house why can’t she with so much do something?
Soon she’s having the downstairs of her home converted so Corrigan can move in; is turning the garden into a vegetable allotment to provide fresh produce for the home; she learns to drive and discovers that she has a sharp eye for spotting bargains in antique sales, reselling her finds to raise yet more money; she and Corrigan eat richly, drink champagne and quote poetry to each other. Before him she’d barely read a book. She takes up painting and discovers a talent for it.
To the reader (and you don’t have to be an attentive reader) Corrigan is plainly not quite all he seems. He’s appeared from nowhere and now everything Mrs Blunt does seems to be about him. She sends large amounts of money as he directs. But Mrs Blunt is alive again, and what price isn’t worth paying for that?
What works here is the characters. Corrigan may be a con-man, but he’s one who at least in part believes his own fiction. He’s living off Mrs Blunt’s generosity, but he clearly genuinely likes her too and he’s desperately jealous of her showing loyalty or affection for anyone else. He’s a passionate rogue; a likeable villain; controlling and insecure yet somehow forgivable all the same.
Mrs Blunt could feel the champagne fizzing in her brain. Corrigan’s voice was mellifluous. She was mesmerised by the intensity of the stare of his blue-green eyes.
Nadine by contrast is a desperately sad figure, marginalised in her own life. Here she’s shocked near-senseless by an unexpected letter from her mother describing how Mrs Blunt has started buying up neighbours’ land on which to grow even more vegetables for the disabled:
Justin came into the kitchen while Nadine was trying to absorb the unexpected contents of her mother’s letter. He sat down at the pine breakfast table and started to read the papers with the nonchalance of a man in a restaurant waiting to be brought a meal.
Nadine made him some coffee and fried him some eggs.
Mrs Murphy is a bit of a cliché, but she’s a likable one and the descriptions of her war-whooping with Nadine’s children or dropping cigarette ash into her baking were small details that brought much needed (and skilfully inserted) life to the scenes where Nadine visits Mrs Blunt. I thought the depiction of her a bit patronising, but like Corrigan she’s a vital force set against the sterile insularity of Nadine and Justin and (initially at least) Mrs Blunt.
So why didn’t I like it? In short, it over-explained. With the notable exception of Corrigan the text constantly told me what people felt and why they felt it. Look back to that quote above regarding Nadine and her parents. It’s well written, but it’s basically exposition. Most of it is much more obvious than that.
If I’m reading some plot-driven thriller then I don’t mind if the author explains everything because it’s all about the story and I’m just looking to be entertained. With serious fiction though I like to have something to do, something to contribute. Here I felt extraneous.
As the book nears its close Nadine’s best friend gets involved trying to resolve the situation and is there to see how things finally shake out. She then sits down with Nadine and literally explains how she sees the other characters’ motivations and how Nadine should view them all. Of course, the friend is just another character in the fiction, but there was no unreliability in her and it seemed very much that Blackwood was essentially telling me what to think about what had happened. I didn’t disagree, but I’d have liked the chance to form my own conclusions.
Corrigan leaves nothing for the reader to do. There’s nothing to interpret and no ambiguities – most motivations are bluntly described as they arise and those that aren’t are summed up by the friend at the end. It’s obvious that Corrigan’s not what he appears and it’s equally obvious that ultimately his lies don’t matter against the new life he gives Mrs Blunt. Blackwood though spells all that out, and in doing so makes this a lesser book.
The afterword and other reviews I’ve read make a great deal of the fact that nobody here turns out to be quite what we expect; that relationships may not be as they appear. I think that’s oversold. Corrigan’s twisted dishonesty with genuine affection is clearly better than Justin’s pompous honesty with genuine indifference, but that’s obvious and I thought the book was too.
Other reviews
Only this one that I’ve seen, from Seraillon, who says absolutely loves this and says that only the “most rigid of teetotalers” might not find it enjoyable. Hopefully for most that’s right, but I was bored.
Filed under: Blackwood, Caroline Tagged: Caroline Blackwood