[In the following excerpt, Milton argues that Blackwood successfully develops conflict between the characters in The Fate of Mary Rose but deviates from her initial concerns and fails to conclude the "who-dunnit" satisfactorily.]

Both Julian Gloag's contemplative new novel, Lost and Found, and Caroline Blackwood's horror tale, The Fate of Mary Rose, are set in rural villages invaded by contemporary ugliness, but the more telling similarity is that they are also both about fathers and fatherhood and that each touches upon the rape of a little girl. In Mr. Gloag's book, rape is only the worst of many outrages, and springs from the brutish, stultifying impact of rustic life. In Miss Blackwood's book, rape is central, an emanation of insanity spawned in urban chaos. Both novels suggest that men cannot accept the fact that violation is a serious threat in their daughters' lives, and that, failing to recognize it, they become in a sense accessories to violation. In its own way each novel offers some poignant insights with considerable skill, and in its own way each novel fails….

The ingredients of The Fate of Mary Rose should also combine into a more satisfying book than in fact they do Like Caroline Blackwood's quite perfect earlier novella The Stepdaughter, which made palpable its protagonist's eerie self-imprisonment in the glass-walled tower of a New York penthouse, The Fate of Mary Rose appears to focus on the destruction of a young girl, while in fact it explores obliquely the insane compulsions that destroy the adults responsible for her.

The novel moves between the male narrator's London apartment and the tiny, tidy village of Beckham, where his wife, Cressida, lives a life of housewifely sacrifice, devoted to the moral and dental hygiene of their 6-year-old daughter, Mary Rose. Through the narrator's eyes, we soon see enough to suspect that behind the jars of homemade preserves and beneath the hand-washed sheets, Cressida nurtures a monstrous obsession. The narrator tells us that his fatherhood, like his marriage, is purely technical; that he is having a quite ordinarily chaotic love affair with a bright young model, and that his life operates, not very comfortably, on a sort of stubborn apathy. But it becomes apparent that he, too, is playing host to an obsessive illusion. While Cressida tries to nourish her sad little life by acting the part of the perfect mother, the narrator hides himself behind an equally false mask of callow masculinity. Beyond his role in conception, he tries to tell himself, fatherhood demands only that he pay the bills and make a ritual monthly appearance for form's sake.

His careful posture of unconcern is the mirror image of Cressida's mad fiction of loving care; the two fantasies, feeding each other, destroy every relationship they touch, and when an unknown attacker rapes and murders a little girl who lives in the public housing near Cressida's cozy cottage, the pair are themselves exploded to reveal the truth beyond their facades. Simple terror lies under Cressida's maternal charade and a hysterical need to indoctrinate her small daughter with her own fear of men and of life. Behind his own mask of indifference, the narrator, who in fact feels a growing concern for his child, also hides fear—fear not merely of women, but of himself and the violence he may do to them.

"She was really the child of the media," the narrator says of the murdered child. "She emerged from the glass of the television set in my livingroom." And her violation and death, like the Council Estate where she lived, are an intrusion of modern hideousness into the artfully preserved myth of rural beauty and bucolic harmony. But like the dovetailing fantasies of the narrator and his wife, the village's violent crime and its delusion of peace almost define and explain each other, like opposite sides of a false equation.

Miss Blackwood portrays the antagonism between her characters with sometimes brilliant irony; in particular, the conflict between the narrator and his wife, which is exaggerated to seem insane and archetypal at the same time, is presented as both a deviation from what society sees as normal behavior between the sexes and also its prototype.

But having set the stage for an intricate and ambiguous drama, Miss Blackwood fails to develop it. In the last third of the novel, her concern with the narrator's murky morality is suddenly overwhelmed by a suspense plot and Beckham's allegorical landscape becomes the backdrop of a rather ordinary thriller. Rather ordinary, I should add, except that instead of providing the final revelation of who did what, why and how, in the usual way of thrillers, the novel veers again and returns for a few last inconclusive pages to the psychological concerns of its beginning.

Disappointed, with an appetite whetted by possibilities that are not fulfilled in The Fate of Mary Rose, one has no recourse but to hope for satisfaction in Miss Blackwood's next novel.