Chillingworth’s life is now void of meaning and he realises it
Chillingworth’s life is now void of meaning, and he realises it.Pearl goes to Europe but Hester chooses to remain in the community and continue a life of contrition.Theme: Hawthorne is one of the first American writers to note how the original settlers allowed the opportunity of the new continent to slip away. He is a bit mad.
In fact, Pearl’s father is the young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. Arthur buries his guilt but, over the course of the book, it gnaws its way to the surface. Meanwhile, Hester’s kindness to the community seems to change the meaning of the letter that she wears.Chillingworth catches Arthur talking to Hester in the woods. Leaping to the correct conclusion, he begins to haunt Arthur and makes some rather suggestive remarks.
Arthur loses control: after delivering a punchy Election Day sermon he finally stands with Hester and Pearl on the scaffold. Plot: This brief and morally strenuous novel is set in the Puritan community of 17th century Boston. In a leisurely introduction, Hawthorne establishes his identity of “narrator”. The novel opens with Hester Prynne standing on an anachronistic public scaffold in front of a large, indignant crowd.
She is charged with adultery but she won’t name her lover: As a punishment she must be exposed to public abuse and is condemned to wear the letter “A” woven onto her clothes In her arms she carries her illegitimate child, Pearl. Hester’s husband is an English scholar who had sent her to Boston. He was to follow her but never turned up because he had been captured by Indians He escaped and now stands among the spectators in disguise. Assuming the name of Roger Chillingworth he vows to uncover Hester’s secret. The withheld resolution, such a dismal feature of Sixties TV scripts, won’t really do any more. But on the whole Gorleston is an assured, likeable piece of work..
“He knew he could never go back.” As Percy is parked on the clifftop at the time, facing out to sea, we need to know whether he’s engaging reverse and planning to leave town or engaging first and planning to go over the top (along with Sutton) for a silly, suicidal finale We aren’t told. The end of the affair, being so predictable, does not make a sufficiently strong pay-off, so Sutton has to provide another one.Percy falls back on the memory of his late wife and their long happy marriage. All that teenage stuff.The outcome is unsurprising, as we are left in no doubt that Queenie is the typical “pretty one” of the family, a 70-plus version of the spoilt, ruthless bitch we’ve all fallen for at some time. He then finds out, in an abrupt and contrived twist, that all was not entirely as he believed it to be in that department either. Sutton’s sense of humour falters, a false, melodramatic note is struck, and the novel’s last line is a clunker.”He put the car into gear,” it says. The affair with Queenie is thus ridiculous, but no more so than certain events that Sutton and his readers can probably recall from their own lives.Percy becomes fascinated after one first glimpse. This leads to the book’s one real problem, apart from the over-heavy irony attending Percy’s fond hopes.
He tactically makes friends with Queenie’s purple-rinsed sister Toots, brings up Queenie’s sacred name in every conversation, discovers her address and drives by her house pointlessly, stakes out shops where he might run into her, and gallantly believes that she is not the callous heartbreaker everybody says she is. By making Percy one of a notoriously buttoned-up lower-middle-class type – “he had never undressed in front of his wife and never had sex with anyone else at all” – Sutton is able to treat him, convincingly, like a naive and romantic teenage boy. At 32 he is himself getting on a bit for a first novelist and the benefits of age and experience show. There are hardly any failed stylistic enterprises or sentimental excesses till the end. She dyes her hair orange, chainsmokes, shouts “Coo-ee!” at people and likes to do stunt- driving tricks in her Metro on Marine Parade, usually at lunchtime so that the more decrepit clientele in the urine-scented dining rooms of the seafront hotels can all see and be shocked by her.It is of course Queenie who lures Percy into driving his Cavalier through Yarmouth’s pedestrian precinct, riding the roller-coaster with her, smoking under the No Smoking sign in the Living Jungle exhibition and, back at her Gorleston bungalow, tumbling into bed “She started to moan and groan. ‘I love you, I love you,’ he whispered as the constellations twinkled above 16 Yallop Avenue, Gorleston-on-Sea.”Love among the aged is in danger of becoming a cliched subject, but Henry Sutton manages it well. Gorleston by Henry Sutton Sceptre, pounds 9.99
Percy rarely went to Yarmouth People living in Gorleston rarely did.. Gorleston was much quieter, much safer.
