The Girl Who Passed for Normal - Hugh Fleetwood

At the start of The Girl Who Passed for Normal (1973) I was prepared for yet another spin on the Jane Eyre plot motif done up as a suspense thriller.  It's one in a long line of novels about a young girl hired by a matriarch or patriarch to care for a young girl.  Though in this case Barbara Michaels, the woman hired, is not really seeking to be a caretaker or even a teacher of anything.  She meets her prospective employer Mary Emerson almost by chance at a party in Rome where Barbara is living temporarily. Mrs. Emerson casually drops into their conversation that her daughter is different and needs watching more than anything but she never seems to be able to find the right person. We are never really told what is wrong with Catherine, the daughter, only that her mother calls her slow and sometimes stupid. Supposedly, Catherine cannot read and cannot do much of anything.  When Barbara meets Catherine she is oddly taken with the girlwho is about 20 years old but often acts as if she were a tween. Despite what Mrs. Emerson has told her Barbara discovers that on occasion Catherine appears to understand Italian and can read English. Who is fooling who here?

And so I was sure this was going to be another book about a sinister mother plotting to have her daughter left in the care of a naive governess of sorts and abandon both of them. But the book is filled ambiguity and shifting points of view. No one is really trustworthy. At the start of the novel Barbara's boyfriend (of sorts) has disappeared. Everyone tells her he's gone off to America. But at one point when Catherine and Barbara are alone the young woman tells her teacher that she believes her mother was having a sexual relationship with David. Barbara knows that she could never keep her hands off of him and begins to suspect this is true. Then Catherine continues with her story-- because David didn't really want Mrs. Emerson he was going to leave Rome.  Catherine says her mother would never have that and so she killed him and buried him in the fields out back of their Italian estate. Barbara dismisses all of this as imaginary story chalking it up to Catherine's child-like nature. But she would be very wrong to dismiss anything that Catherine says from this point onward.

The novel begins as an odd travelogue of ex-pats in Italy focusing on Barbara's education of Catherine and the young woman's transformation from child-like nitwit into a mature young woman with occasional episodes from the past describing Barbara's love-hate relationship with her ailing mother in London and her obsessive love for David. Inexorably the story morphs from mainstream character study into a creepy suspense novel with the main questions being what happened to David? Did someone kill him? Or did he really leave for America?  And if dead, is he really buried in the fields out back of the Emerson estate?

By the midpoint the reader can't really trust anything that anyone says. Mary Emerson at first appears to be a flaky eccentric, transplanted from her American Southern roots into her private oasis on the outskirts of Rome and looking for every opportunity to get rid of her nuisance child hoping to dump her on any young woman she can exploit as a nursemaid. Barbara is obsessed with her unrequited love for David and she allows her imagination to get the better of her on a daily basis.  She is quick to believe that anyone has run off with him or that he was having sex with anyone who paid attention to him At times she even believes him to be gay and in love with his best friend, an older philosopher professor named Marcello.  Meanwhile, Catherine continues to tell frightening stories about violence in the present and the past. She can't help herself.  The stories just come tumbling out. Like the one about her mother poisoning her father and trying to make it look as if he committed suicide. Barbara beings to worry, but soon it will be too late to worry.

The Girl Who Passed for Normal is ostensibly meant to refer to Catherine. By the end of the novel when Catherine and Barbara have become inextricably entwined in a perverse surrogate mother/daughter relationship and bound to each other through a gruesome and utterly bizarre violent act it is pretty clear that the girl in the title is no longer Catherine but Barbara.

I was very impressed with this book. Some of the paperback blurbs promise a horrible surprise in the final chapters. Another understatement! Fleetwood strikes me as a male version of Patricia Highsmith. I was very much drawn into this strange world pervaded by a sinister ambiguity in his second novel. Everyone seemed a little bit off and I was never sure who was up to no good and who was truly telling the truth. Though the gothic elements pile on a bit too thick in the last three chapters it seemed to be the inevitable outcome for this odd pair of young women.

Hugh Fleetwood, circa 1979
from the jacket of The Redeemer, US edition

THE AUTHOR: Hugh Fleetwood (1944 - ) is a writer and painter still alive and creating works of art. At 18 he moved to France to paint and by age 21 he was living in Italy. He lived there for 14 years and set many of his early novels in and around Rome. The Girl Who Passed for Normal was his second novel but his first foray into weird crime/suspense. It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1972.  He followed up with about eight or so other novels that might be classified as crime or psychological suspense novels. In total he produced 24 novels, a volume of poetry and several collections of short stories.  As an artist he has had exhibits of his paintings in Spoleto and in London. Fleetwood continues to write and paint in his home in London. His most recent novels were all written (or revised versions of incomplete books) during the pandemic year of 2020 and are available as digital books produced by the author himself.

EASY TO FIND?  There are several paperback versions of this book in US, UK and foreign language translations.  Most copies in English I found were affordably priced.  Sadly, I have yet to locate a UK 1st edition.  The DJ illustration was designed and painted by the author and I was hoping one would turn up online. But not even his website where you can view his eerie, other worldly artwork offers one up for viewing. Ah well...  happy hunting anyway! More reviews of Hugh Fleetwood's crime novels are coming in the months ahead. But probably not until next year.