Poetic Thriller

THE HOUSE BY THE SEA (271 pp.)--Jon Godden--Rinehart ($2.75).

When Edwina Marsh was a teenager, her father had once said: "My girl, don't be a fool--put your shoulders back, hold up your head, and don't be ashamed to show the world that you are shaped as a woman ought to be." But all her life she remained ashamed, awkward and uncontrollably shy. Now she was 41, "a big colourless woman in a brown skirt and a high-necked blue sweater. The shoulders were square, the neck long and firm, the legs straight and big, like pillars."

She had taken the little money her father had left her, walked out on her domineering spinster roommate in London and bought a lonesome cliffside house on the Cornish coast. In her second novel, British Author Jon Godden* has drawn a terrifying picture of the consequences of Edwina's loneliness, a warning of the psychological perils that beset those humans who cannot make their terms with humanity.

To the house by the sea, dragging a sprained ankle, comes Ross Dennehay, a deserter from the U.S. Army in England. An amoral boor whose only aim is to get back to the U.S. and some easy wartime money, he has already killed two people in making his getaway. Edwina hides him for ten days, nurses him, becomes his mistress. She stands in horror of his past, suffers from his coarseness, even realizes that Dennehay wouldn't hesitate to kill her at the first suspicious move. But greater than her revulsion and fear is the larger fear of the lonesomeness that awaits her when he leaves. For even this windfall, this shabby and dangerous interlude of love, her gratitude is immense.

When a suspicious British soldier leads a searching party to the house, Dennehay goes over the cliff and is smashed to death. As Author Godden handles this story, it becomes at once an anguished lyric and a beautifully balanced tale of suspense.

* Younger sister of Novelist Rumer Godden (Black Narcissus).

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