Evil in Normandy

GYPSY, GYPSY--Rumer Godden--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Rumer Godden is an Englishwoman who lives in India. Last year her Black Narcissus (TIME, July 17, 1939) spun out the struggling efforts of a group of Anglican nuns to do good against the handicaps of their new convent (a quondam seraglio) and the tremendous face of Kinchinjunga which confronted their small and gentle souls. Reviewers' adjective for Black Narcissus was "enchanting." It will do for Gypsy, Gypsy, too.

Gypsy, Gypsy might have been written by Emily Bronte if she and her prose had pernicious anemia but were not otherwise seriously indisposed. The scene: a chateau in Normandy, cradled between the noises of the sea and a huge house of doves. The villainess: Aunt Barbe, an aging beauty with a body like a whip, fox-red hair, a spoiled child's genius for misusing others, and a voracity for doing evil which grows in ratio to her sense of guilt. She works out on her niece Henrietta, on her sheeplike old nurse Nana, on the peasants, on an intense young priest who manages to frighten her. She becomes fascinated by an Oriental theory that one may be cleansed of venereal disease through sexual intercourse with a virgin child; that leads her to its spiritual parallel, the relief of her own evil through the corruption, or killing, of a pure soul. A young gypsy who happens through is just her meat. Persuading him to camp a while on her land with his wife and children, she subtly and systematically seduces, tames and corrupts him.

To the telling of this lurid, rather hopped-up tale Rumer Godden brings three saving graces: an acute sense of psychological tension and overtone, a coolly notable skill at prose, a peculiar ability in atmospheres (she seems particularly to be obsessed with the look of pale things in darkness). These talents alone may not make a first-rate novel: but they have a snaky power to hypnotize, and a certain distinction.

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