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AUTHOR : ADRIAN LOHMANN (c) 1998
The Hothouse by the East River
by Muriel Spark
Summary
In 1944 Paul Hazlett is working in the Compound, a secret government department
in Britain, which specialized in propaganda broadcasts over Europe. There
he falls in love with Elsa Janovic who is also engaged with black propaganda
and psycho-logical warfare in this particular Compound. Other members of
the Compound are Miles Bunting, Princes Xavier, Colonel Tylden and several
prisoners of war. Among those POWs is Helmut Kiel, a German who has chosen
to work for the enemy and is now broadcasting for the Compound. Elsa and
Kiel happen to have a love affair and after a few months Kiel is sent back
to the prison camp. From there he goes on the air in a prisoners of war
exchange-of-greetings programme betraying the identity of the Compound,
which was supposed to be an authentic underground German sta-tion. Six
or seven years after war Kiel dies in prison.
In late spring of 1944 Paul, Elsa and the other members of their intelligence
unit gather in a hotel in London having just returned from a mission to
the United States. Paul tells his colleagues that he has got a good job
waiting for him in America and a place to stay for Elsa and him. The next
day they get ready to go back to the country when a V-2 bomb hits them
direct just as their train starts pulling out and Paul, Elsa, Princess
Xavier, Miles Bunting and Colonel Tylden die.
Paul believes to be the only survivor of the bomb attack although he
is dead and af-ter some time he imagines to live together with Elsa in
an antiquated apartment by the East River in New York. He is convinced
that he has dreamt up Elsa, who now is his wife, their children Pierre
and Katerina and Princess Xavier. From a certain point on he is sure that
those „imagined“ people have become real due to his
imagination. In fact neither of them is real. They have risen from the
dead or as in the case of Pi-erre and Katerina they never really existed.
Nevertheless they live among people who are real and alive. They
are even considered to be real persons by everyone else. Though there seems
to be something wrong with Elsa. Paul realises that she is casting a shadow
in the wrong direction; her shadow falls in a different angle to eve-ryone
else's shadow no matter from where the light shines upon her. In addition
to that Elsa needs to meet he analyst quite often as she is departing from
reason from time to time.
She spends her day mainly by sitting by window and looking at the East
River.
Approximately 30 years after their death Elsa tells Paul that she has
recognised a salesman in a shoe store to be Helmut Kiel. Paul does not
believe her as he is cer-tainly put out that Kiel died in prison and knowing
that his wife is mad. But after proving her statement and having seen the
man himself he believes that this cer-tain person is Helmut
Kiel although he ought to look much older. Paul now feels in danger
from Kiel because he thinks that Kiel has returned to haunt him in order
to take revenge for his imprisonment. Kiel calls himself Mueller
and when Elsa goes back to the shoe store to talk to him he denies to be
Kiel and claims that he was not yet born in 1944. Paul tells his son Pierre
about Kiel but Pierre does not show any interest whereas Katerina is curious
about Kiel as she had heard so much about him and her mother and that they
had an affair back in 1944. As a result Elsa arranges a meeting and Kiel
pays her fifteen hundred dollars in order to sleep with Katerina.
Pierre takes advantage of the general confusion and uses the fact that
he figured out that his father gets psychiatric treatment to blackmail
him as Pierre needs money for his own production of the play Peter Pan.
During a visit of Elsa´s friend Princess Xa-vier their maid gets
a fit and quits her job. That is a perfect chance for Elsa´s analyst
Garven Bey to get to know more about her unnatural shadow and her
case so that he offers to be their butler.
Without any notice Elsa disappears one day and then phones her husband
from Zürich saying that she is on vacation with Mueller and is sleeping
with him to find out whether he is Kiel or not. Shortly after her arrival
in New York Paul tells her that their son's play is opening that night
and that they really ought to go there. Before they leave Elsa asks Garven
to buy some rotten tomatoes. When they finally arrive at the theatre they
recognise Miles Bunting, a former member of the Compound who died with
them in the train, on a huge poster who is playing the part of Peter Pan.
Pierre thinks that every actor in the play has to be over sixty to make
it a success. During the performance Elsa suddenly stands up and starts
throwing tomatoes at the actors whereupon an uproar begins and the police
arrest several people including Garven and Paul. After that Garven and
Paul decide to send Elsa to a clinic but she refuses to go. Paul now feels
in danger from Garven as he has the feeling of being followed by him. Almost
at the same time Paul tries to date Kiel for the evening because he is
under the impression that he and Kiel had a sentimental encounter in the
year 1944 and he wishes to repeat the affair as an experiment in order
to establish Kiel's iden-tity.
In the end Paul is sitting in a bar watching a group of people consisting
of Elsa, Prin-cess Xavier, Kiel and Miles Bunting. When another man heads
towards the group he knows that it is Colonel Tylden, another person from
the Compound. Then Paul gets up, grasps Elsa's arm and pulls her out of
the bar heading towards a night-club. This is when Elsa tells Paul that
he also died in the bomb attack in 1944. When they re-alise that the group
are following them they continue their escape through several discos and
clubs. In a hotel they happen to arrive at the golden wedding of two old
friends and afterwards they visit Pierre and Katerina telling them that
they (Pierre and Katerina) do not exist. Finally Paul goes to see his oldest
friend once more and at the very end Paul and Elsa stand in front of their
apartment block at the East River seeing that the old building is pulled
down in order to be replaced by a modern one. Just at that moment Princess
Xavier, Kiel, Miles Bunting and Colonel Tylden pass by in a car and take
Paul and Elsa back with them so that they can have peace.
Characterisation
Paul
Paul is the main character of this novel. The narrator's omniscient
point of view often switches temporarily to Paul's view so that one gets
a close look at his character.
Paul is the only one who believes not to have died in the bomb attack
and therefore thinks that he is simply imagining several people, especially
Elsa. He assumes that she cannot be real and that there must be something
wrong about her because of her shadow falling in the wrong direction (p.107
"She's not real [..] Haven't I been telling you for years? I dreamt her
up. I called her back from the grave. She's dead, and all that goes with
her. Look at her shadow!").
Paul feels superior to her but is unsure about whether she is sane
or insane. He is terrified by her unnatural shadow and her strange behaviour
which he cannot inter-pret or understand (e.g. that she is staring out
of the window all day). Actually it is him who is mad as he is not able
to cope with his delusions and has constant doubts concerning Elsa and
himself (p.6 " 'Is she sly and sophisticated, not mad after all? But it
isn't possible...' ", p.10 " 'She is looking for something out there.'
[..] Silently Paul says to himself: 'It's not there.' [..] 'There's nothing
there.' ", p.15 f " 'Help me! Help me!' cries his heart, battering the
sides of the coffin. [..] 'Let me out!..' He will not sleep beside her
in bed any more. Never again, never again. No man can sleep with a woman
[..] who gets light or something from elsewhere. ").
The appearance of Kiel makes him even more insecure and he feels a
danger to his life. Even the apartment itself seems to deteriorate Paul's
state as it is too hot in winter and in summer (p87 " 'This apartment kills
me,[..] It's antiquated. The heat's terrible. You can't control it.[..]'
").
He keeps his desperate condition and tries to hide it until the very
end of the story. Only when Elsa tells him that he has died as well and
when he is facing his former dead colleagues he believes her with a kind
of relief so that his torture will come to a peaceful end (p.126 " '...
I remember to many things to be dead.' [..] 'No, Paul', says Elsa. 'That
was your imagination running away with itself.' ", p.133 " 'You can't kill
us,' says Paul. ' We're dead already.' ").
Another trait of Paul is that he has got a tendency to homosexuality
because he ap-parently had an affair with Kiel or at least had strong emotions
for him during the war (p. 117 "...she will always wonder if Kiel was anything
to me.").
Elsa
Beside Paul Elsa is the other main character displayed in the story.
She seems to be completely mad when one looks at her only superficially.
But that is only due to the ignorance of the reader about what is actually
going on. In addition there is some-thing mysterious about her so that
one never knows what to think of her. Even in 1944 when she is still alive
she claims to have "supernatural communications". After she has risen from
the dead she casts a shadow that falls in the wrong direction. Though Elsa
visits her analyst quite often she simply does it for fun in order to lead
him to desperation, which she later manages with perfection (p. 83 " I
don't want to be your analyst any more,' Garven says. 'It isn't a question
of money, it's a question that you're eating away my life in nibbles. [..]'
", p.86 " ' You're all mad,' says Gar-ven...").
Elsa even seems to be in control of much more. She makes Paul feel
inferior (p.19 " ' [..] and I'm only a little figure far beneath her and
her thoughts.' "), sells Katerina to Helmut Kiel (p.98 " ' [..] I sold
Katerina to Mueller for fifteen hundred dollars one night [..].' ", p.99
" '[..] She tosses in with everybody, so why not with him?[..]' "), ruins
her son's play by throwing tomatoes at the actors and goes on holidays
with Helmut Kiel and then tells her husband she is sleeping with him (Kiel).
She is definitely en-joying to be careless and indifferent maybe because
she knows that she is dead and not real anyway. The only person she is
not fooling is her friend Princess Xavier to whom she talks honestly and
in confidence. Not surprisingly Elsa is able to describe her real nature
herself (p.85 " ' [..] My psyche is like a skyscraper, stretching up an
up, practically all glass and steel so that one can look out over everything,
and one never bends.' ").
When the story is about to end Elsa obviously changes her behaviour
and becomes more understanding towards Paul and gives up her meanness.
Criticism, Judging
The novel "The Hothouse by the East River" written by Muriel Spark in 1973
is ex-tremely surprising and leaves many things to imagination of the reader.
One can never really distinguish between reality and fiction for the narrator
only shows one piece of the action at one time and the mysterious parts
of the story are not com-pletely explained. There is no reason given for
the resurrection of the originally dead characters, the existence of Pierre
and Katerina and one will never know why espe-cially Elsa's shadow was
falling in an unnatural direction and why no one else's? What was different
about her? One may consider this challenging to one's mind but in my opinion
the author should have given some more information in order to solve the
mystery.
Another point is that there is a historical mistake in the story. It
is said that the Com-pound members were killed by a V-2 rocket in late
spring of 1944. But the historical fact is that the first attack with the
V-2 rocket was on the sixth of September, 1944, when two V-2's were launched
unsuccessfully against Paris. The first V-2 rockets against London were
therefore launched after that date. Assuming that Muriel Spark wanted to
write corresponding with real historical happenings (at least for the back-ground
of her story) she has made a mistake.
Nevertheless in my opinion this novel is really excellent due to the
mystic and his-torical components and the odd plot that provides many surprising
and cheerful ele-ments. It is also a pleasure to observe the development
of the madness of the two main characters.
Sources:
Werner von Braun & Frederick I. Ordway "History of Rocketry and Space
Travel" 3rd Edition Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York 1975
Adrian Lohmann
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