Foreign Affairs - Hugh Fleetwood

Paolo Levin, concert pianist living in Rome, is being followed by an emaciated and crippled young man.  He stands outside Paolo's apartment and watches the pianist. For weeks the young man shadows Paolo. He starts to show up dressed exactly like Paolo. After several failed attempts to get the stalker to explain himself the young man speaks: "I wish you would speak in English. I don't understand a damn word of Italian." Everything changes when Paolo tracks the young man to an apartment building in the Via Francesco Crispi. Shortly after the young man enters Paolo knocks on the door. He is taken aback when a young woman answers. Paolo soon discovers this is the young man's sister. From then on the terror truly begins.

What begins as an early stalker novel (before such things dominated crime fiction) soon turns into a devilish tale of control, obsessive love, bizarre torture, and mind games. Paolo is hardly a protagonist we want to root for.  On page one of the novel we discover he is vain man, the first paragraph is devoted to the decor of his apartment which is mostly made up of framed photographs of himself, both clothed and nude. The first pages continue to reveal a deluded and above average musician who while technically proficient is a slouch at artistic expression according to the classical music reviews in Italian newspapers. Nevertheless, Paolo sees himself as a great artist. It's difficult to care about Paolo until he falls under the spell of his stalker and then his sister. But are their intentions truly in Paolo's best interests?  

Though the story is primarily about Paolo he is hardly the most interesting character. Ralph, the 21 year old disabled man, is the more magnetic and fascinating of this doomed duo. Ralph confesses he fell in love with Paolo after watching him play his last concert. Ralph seems to have some kind of psychic connection with Paolo; he knows entirely too much about his private life. Also he cannot help but tell Paolo that he is not a great musician, not quite yet. If Paolo would only give himself over to Ralph and his sister he could make him what he wants to become. What is Paolo willing to give up in order to become that truly great artist?  

While this all plays out the sudden death by suicide of Paolo's friend Christopher haunts the pianist. As Paolo develops a friendship with Maggie, Ralph's sister, and comes to recognize both brother and sister as friends interested in his career Fleetwood drops hints that Christopher's death will connect all three people in a strange pact. In a truly shocking scene Paolo, after a night of carousing, finds himself waking handcuffed to his bed. What follows is one of Fleetwood's signature bizarre scenes of incomprehensible violence and cruelty ending with Paolo making a promise to his captor that will transform his life forever.

Fleetwood successfully subverts all expectations, eschews formula each time the story seems to be fumbling into routine and mundane events. He reverses the reader's sympathies on nearly every other page.  Paolo, at first an arrogant deluded wannabe, becomes a victim one feels empathy for. Ralph is sinister and sociopathic in one section, tender in loving in another. Paolo shifts into a vengeful would-be murderer while both Maggie and Ralph seem to become victims. Maggie at first a kind and sweet girlfriend morphs into a harridan that Paolo ought to abandon all while Ralph once again takes the upper hand. It is never clear whose side we should be on. Are they all at each other's throats plotting and exploiting one another without ever letting on what each of the three truly wants? Each time I thought I had figured out where the story was headed I literally gasped at the reversals and jarring plot pivots.

The blurb on the paperback edition I own quotes a Library Journal review describing this book as "insidiously hypnotizing." That's not hyperbole. When I reviewed Fleetwood's The Girl Who Passed for Normal last year in November I mentioned that the writer had technique in plotting and psychological suspense comparable to the best of Patricia Highsmith. Once again I will raise that worthy comparison. Though at times Foreign Affairs (1974) meanders into repetitive character monologues with obvious revelations Fleetwood will subvert expectations and twist the story around on itself. The climax involving a foot race along a cliffside pathway is truly a spine-tingling sequence that includes such reversals three times in a matter of four paragraphs culminating in a final gasp inducing sentence. It's beyond clever for a crime writer, it's a master stroke of ingenuity. 

There are some bothersome intrusions that threaten to undermine the entire plot like Paolo's antipathy towards marriage rendered in the cliched metaphor that it is a trap that will rob him of his freedom. Paolo's friendship with a superficial American ex-pat, Elaine, who thankfully disappears well before the midpoint is intended as either comic relief or an indication that Paolo can develop close relationships and yet adds little to the real story of the intertwined trio of Paolo, Ralph and Maggie. And the tendency for Ralph and Maggie to deliver lengthy monologues bogged down in reiteration could've been more powerfully conveyed with the help of an editor's blue pencil. 

Fleetwood continually surprises with paradoxical moments in this highly unusual tale of emotional blackmail that ultimately leads to self-discovery. Violence explodes out of tenderness. Lust gives way to devotion which gives way to mutual respect. And if in the end it seems that some form of contentment has been achieved, that love can be a learned behavior, it all comes at a terrible price. Secrets and sacrifices lead to an oddly fulfilled happiness for only two of these three characters who all seemed doomed from the start.

QUOTES:  And suddenly he felt that what was happening no longer concerned him. As if it wasn't he who was threatened, but someone called Paolo who had been invented by the brother and sister. A mere image of Paolo.

Ralph:  "She thinks that if you really got to love the music you played, instead of just yourself playing it --if you really understood what you were playing--then you would start to love her." 

He wanted to laugh. The world was marvelous when greed was the only proof of sincerity.

Maggie:  "[Ralph's] been the whole of my life. In a way he's almost me, and I'm almost him.  But in spite of it -- or because of that" --she hesitated-- "I'd love to be free of him."

He walked along with the cripple on his arm, and felt almost proud of the boy; as if he were leading an obscene bride to a sacrificial pyre.

EASY TO FIND?  Foreign Affairs was reprinted by Valancourt Books several years ago. Used and new copies of this trade paperback reprint are easily obtainable on various bookselling sites. Copies of both hardcover (mostly US editions) and paperback editions (a mix of UK and US) also turn up at the usual used book websites. Happy hunting! 

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 begins 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.