Of the many lies our parents tell us, the myth of the happy life is the one we seem least willing to relinquish. If we no longer have much faith in historical progress, some still hope for the individual to beat the odds and live exempt from the injustices which afflict and define the past. Despite the detours and setbacks tripping everyone around us, we want to be optimistic for ourselves and believe that life has forward motion, that where we end will be some place further away and better from where we began.

Although we pay lip service to the genius of our most depressed artists, in our hearts most of us remain failed pessimists. Hope has many manifestations, of course, and the desire to live happily ever after can be seen at its most rudimentary level as the pursuit of affluence, and at its most transcendent as belief in God. But in a certain sense, both attest to the indefatigable belief in the second chance, in our hope that somewhere lies the miracle cure, the last-minute rescue. Often there is, but often there is not. We ignore too easily the possibility of the sneak attack in the dark, the accident waiting to happen. In even the most mundane murder mystery, the family member is often the killer.

At the end of Caroline Blackwood's novel, The Fate of Mary Rose, a father kidnaps his daughter to save her from becoming paralyzed by her mother's terror of violence. But the child has learned to fear even her father and so flings herself from the car to escape him. As he sees the tiny body sprawled on the pavement, he thinks:

And if the child were to survive … I wondered if she would ever manage to escape the demon-infested murky world of her mother, if for Mary Rose the plunge towards the tarmac would not always seem safer than life.

Our own lives are supposed to be a haven. But the refuge of the personal may be our most enduring illusion. The energy of human desire naturally seeks to protect us from the calamity, disillusion, and fear we have learned from experience. The curse is that trying to live happily, we are in constant flight from life itself.

This threat of the world outside has been the subject of Caroline Blackwood's previous novels. From the highrise apartment of The Stepdaughter to the Irish country house of Great Granny Webster to the middle-class bungalows of The Fate of Mary Rose, she cheerfully evokes the small terrors of the everyday and the more unwieldly evils stumbling anyone who ventures from their door. If she takes as her subject particular domestic dramas, and if her characters make bunkers out of their houses and rarely leave their rooms, it is only to demonstrate how the larger world is always with us. Lived history is not an abstraction functioning independently of the individual, but the narrative line which brings together the muddle of personal crises, feuds, and betrayals that are our heritage.

In describing Dunmartin Hall, the ancestral hall in Great Granny Webster, Blackwood writes:

Dunmartin Hall always had an aura of impermanence. The house had both the melancholy and the magic of something inherently doomed by the height of its own, ancient, colonial aspirations. It was like a grey and decaying palace fortress beleaguered by invasions of hostile, natural forces.

If experience can be said to have a core, or if our place in the world has a character which defines it, we see it perpetually in the permanence of human folly. To understand the past clearly is to see that human beings are afterthoughts to creation, anxious visitors forever trying to bring reason to a universe that finds its power in chaos. The creations we force upon the world, from art and architecture to imperialist fantasies and philosophical ideas, are nothing more than tombstones which mark our passage through an inherently hostile, natural world.

This apprehension of the fragility of the human form encircled and conquered by nature is the center of the Gothic imagination. Caroline Blackwood comes from the tradition of other Irish masters of this vision, like Sheridan LeFanu and Bram Stoker, in her acceptance of evil as the foundation of the universe and primal fright in human souls as the energy at the beginning of all experience. The terror in the Gothic vision emerges from the awareness of our irrevocable separation from nature and helplessness as its victims. It is to this fact that experience continually returns and which exists as our natural, worldly inheritance.

In this almost primitive understanding of the mysteries of dread and the menace invading every moment of our lives, Blackwood is unnervingly anti-modern. Blackwood is rare among contemporary writers in that there are no elegies to loss in her work. If there is no indication of the betrayals common to the modern age's fall from grace, it is because the focus of her sight exists outside the history and locates the sinister in the world itself. And if her work is often chillingly comic and free of the beleaguered anguish we are used to hearing from our darkest writers, it is because nihilists are slow learners who have come late to the point. Their despair is always after-the-fact, the result of having once had hope and found it abolished by the capriciousness and malevolence of reality. The Gothic imagination continues to haunt us because it accepts doom and recognizes the world as it is and has always been. There is no exile from paradise in this vision, but an ever present horror into which each of us must awaken.

In the unrelenting integrity of her vision, Blackwood is most like Samuel Beckett. But there is a passivity in the face of nothingness in Beckett's work that is absent in her novels. To Blackwood seeing the nothing that is there is not the culmination of a vision, as with Beckett, but the originating word that has echoed since prehistory and which undercuts all human behavior. It is also, for her, the moment by which we come to consciousness.

In a letter from his cell in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde wrote of the perspective of the world seen from the bars of his window:

Prison life makes one see people and life as they are, that is why it turns one to stone. It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusion of life in constant motion. They revolve with life and contribute to its unreality. We who are immobile both see and know.

The houses in Caroline Blackwood's fiction have a truth similar to Wilde's prison. Always the danger lies in stopping, in seeing existence freed of the vibrancy and distractions which hold us to our usual course. It is these revelations of immobility which reveal the self's movement as a paralysis of spirit and the reality outside it as a hallucination. The mystery is how we reintegrate ourselves into the casual order of life after these moments of doubt which strike the mind with the power of the truest enlightenment. For this is the impasse which holds most ordinary lives in suspension and in fear. But within this scope, within the delusions we mistake as reality and the bad faith we mistake as love, Caroline Blackwood's novels examine the possibilities of movement left to us, and whether it is conceivable to move one step forward without setting off another bomb.

In Blackwood's new novel, Corrigan, Devina Blunt has lived as a recluse all the years since her husband's death. Mrs. Blunt is like Blackwood's character in her short story, "Angelica," who haunts the graveyard where her husband is buried and imagines that "all around her, the dead were lying there in the mud, waiting to be alive again." In Devina Blunt and Angelica, Blackwood captures the sense of the mind's conquering of time, of how the limbo of grief reduces the present to a vigil over the past. So the life of memory becomes ongoing existence.

Her daughter rails against Devina's passivity and refusal to reenter society. But Devina refuses to yield to the present until it becomes more compelling than the past. So until she first hears the sounds of Corrigan's wheelchair rattling up the stones of her drive, she is content to wander about her property talking to her dead husband, as she waits for something miraculous to happen. Corrigan, with his crippled legs, silken compassion, and repertoire of dreadful metaphors, is the miracle who returns Devina Blunt to the world.

When Corrigan arrives to sell a lapful of little white flags to raise money for St. Crispins, the hospital that saved his life, Devina is overwhelmed by Corrigan's apparent selflessness and desire to do good in the world. He speaks to her of the loneliness of the infirm and his dream to raise money to build a library to repay St. Crispins's kindness. "At the beginning, just after my accident," Corrigan tells her, "all I really craved were the poppies of oblivion. But they made me realize that I shouldn't see myself as ashes where once I had been fire."

Corrigan speaks throughout with the emotionalism of an inferior poet who believes fervently in his own genius and weeps at the depths of his feelings. But it is just the kind of exuberant sentimentality that can intimidate those with more subdued passions. Corrigan's tireless optimism convinces Devina of the aimlessness of her life. She comes to believe that if she succumbs to Corrigan's dream she, too, might save her soul from ruin.

Corrigan possesses the confidence of all little-league gurus who know how to strike most directly at the isolated heart. And his manipulation of Devina flourishes beyond his most extravagant hopes. She develops the singlemindedness of the convert who discovers a cause greater than the self. Devina decides to put her acreage to work to produce fruits and vegetables for the patients of St. Crispins. And as the farm project expands, Devina rebuilds her drawing room into sleeping quarters for Corrigan and disfigures her entranceway with a ramp for his chair. But just as Corrigan appears to have infiltrated every aspect of her life and diminished her ties to her family, Devina is found dead in her room.

If the novel followed the predictable course of stories of this kind, Corrigan would be held responsible for Devina's death. And indeed, as Mrs. Blunt's daughter investigates Corrigan's past to prove his guilt, she discovers what the reader has suspected from the beginning: that St. Crispins is a seedy pan-cake house, not a hospital, and that Corrigan's paralysis is as fraudulent as his dreams. She also learns that none of this would have been news to her mother. The mystery of Corrigan is not how Devina Blunt dies, but why she transformed her life to accommodate someone she knew was a fake.

After he had become part of the household, Corrigan spoke with his customary pretentiousness of Pascal:

"Maybe I identify with him because he, too, had an unenviable physique. When he wrote 'Notre nature est dans le mouvement,' it is proof that he transcended his afflictions. Finish the sentence for me, Devina."

"'Le repos entier est la mort,'" Mrs. Blunt recited bashfully.

In Devina's return to vitality, Blackwood inverts Pascal's understanding of human nature existing within movement, and questions what it means to move about the world when it has no purpose. In so doing, she reveals a truth on the other side of hope: one which affirms the emptiness of life without thereby surrendering to that inertia which is death to the spirit. The issue central to Corrigan is how, then, do we act in the face of such hopelessness.

But Blackwood does not mean hopeless in the sense with which we are most familiar. It is not synonymous with the paralysis of despair. To be without hope in her sense is to discover in oneself the immobility Wilde speaks of in his letter from prison, a way of being or seeing that reveals our place in the world with the truest calm. It is absolutely opposed to the passivity that cripples the unloved Renata in The Stepdaughter or the weakling Mary Rose. Their helplessness allows them to be trampled and conquered, easy victims waiting for the "undesirable accident" that forever alters their lives.

Blackwood's novels unsettle us because she gives us the world as we suspect it exists in our most secret moments. She removes our usual recourse to consolation and security by quietly suggesting that there is nothing beyond the life into which we are born. In this isolation, we see ourselves like the people abandoned outside Wilde's prison, scrambling to find antidotes to the frailty and treachery that are the character of human experience.

To say that no resolution exists should come as no surprise, but even now we resist such matter-of-fact statements of our ill-fated purpose. It is a natural, protective response to dismiss such a view as pessimistic, but to do so evades the complexity of the issues Blackwood raises. There is a modesty in her acceptance of the insignificance of the human form that goes beyond any simplistic ideas of negativity. She makes us aware again of how dangerous the world is and of the impossible value we place on experience. In this light, our efforts to translate the ambiguity we know into the certainty we desire seem desperate in their intention.

Through Devina's knowing nod to Corrigan's paralysis, Blackwood implies that all transcendence is false transcendence. But we sustain the illusion of flight, even if it amounts to little in the end. In spite of himself, Corrigan leads Devina to the simple wisdom to say, "I have been fooled by none of this," and to go forward anyway until she decides she's had enough.

As he looked to the past before his death, Kafka wrote in his journal: "When considering the hopes I had formed for life, the one which appeared the most important was the desire to acquire a way of seeing … in which life would keep its heavy moments of rise and fall, but would at the same time be recognized, and with no less admirable clarity, as a nothing, a dream, a drifting state." The mobility that Blackwood imagines is just such a truce with existence: to find the elusive balance between the dazzle of nothing and the misbelief that our lives measurably touch the world.