None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrine is the most unlike the rest. In fact, in his TLS review, Arthur-Calder Marshall observed that Sully’s critical reputation (back when she had one) would have been higher if she’d had the stamina to rewrite the same novel over and over, like Ivy Compton-Burnett. Instead, he wrote,
Each of her novels, like those of Miss Muriel Spark, is original in the sense of being not merely unlike those of other authors but also unlike her other novels. Each demands from the reader an approach without preconceptions; each erects the standards by which the author wishes this particular book to be judged. There is no Sullyland, but there is a Sully world, as yet as ill-defined in her eight novels as the maps of the early cosmographers. It is being filled in piece by non-continguous piece.
From what I have been able to learn, Sully’s novels were set in southern England in a time somewhere between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Skrine, however, while set in the same area, takes place in a time after most of the population and signs of civilization in England — and the rest of the world, we must assume — has been wiped out by some worldwide holocaust. Nuclear war? Plague? One cannot tell. “Surface earthquakes” is the most we are told. Survivors band together in scattered farms or the startings of small walled towns. Others roam the landscape, living by their wits and ability to overpower those like them.
As Skrine opens, the title character, has just killed a woman for a pack of cigarettes. He finds just one cigarette — desiccated or ersatz — left in the pack. No matches on her. And his lighter long out of fluid. He moves on.
A lone wanderer, Skrine is a stranger, looked at with suspicion and fear by anyone he encounters. And his memory is haunted by people — an old woman, a man, a child. Are they people he killed? “These people don’t exist — except in my brain. I must rid myself of them.” “I’ll be the boss,” he tells himself. “I’ll banish these apparitions for once and all time.”
But after he swims across a wide river — the Thames? — and collapses on the far shore, his imagination kicks in again. He sees a boy watching him. He cannot recall killing a child. Had he stolen food from him? “Children had been abandoned or deliberately lost and there had been rumours of cannabalism and the rumour hadn’t surprised Skrine or troubled him in those days — at least, not much.”
After stumbling on in a delirium of hunger, he comes across a group outside a walled town burying four bodies — three adults and a child. He edges up, watches, then cries out, “This child is alive.” Taken into the town, he is hailed as a healer. Some sort of illness is taking its toll, and the inhabitants flock to him to be cured. The mayor holds a council and it is decided to let Skrine stay.
At this point, the narrative shifts. Within a few days, Skrine discerns that the arrangements of power are more complex than he first thought. The real power is held by Jervis, a short, nasty, and brutish man who took over the town with the help of a small band of men armed with guns. Do the guns really work? No one has the appetite to find out. A few of the original inhabitants murmur about taking control back. Jervis recognizes the value of an ambiguous opposition and gives them just enough rope to keep muttering behind his back. He cultivates Skrine as an ally — also recognizing that Skrine sees himself as a loner and idealist, and hence probably not capable of organizing any viable resistance.
Skrinecould be read as a parable for the use of power in the age of Twitter. Jervis warns the people of the threat of attacks from other towns to the south. In reality, he wants to take their remnants of running machinery and supplies. In response to his threats, Skrine and others mutter their objections — but no one makes any over gesture of opposition. And Jervis has his trolls among the small population, raising charges against Skrine: Theft! Rape! Murder!
If a parable, then Skrine offers little hope for us today. Fear may be a negative force, but in the right hands it can be extremely effective, especially when it gathers an influential minority to its cause. A reviewer in the Catholic Herald called Skrine “an absolutely remorseless, post-Apocalypse novel, uncompromisingly bleak.” It is all those things — and also impossible to put down. One wonders how Kathleen Sully — then a mother of three teenagers — found a way to such dark emotions and then translated them so powerfully to the page. And one also has to wonder: how is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?