“It is impossible to stop reading Kathleen Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,” wrote one reviewer of Burden of the Seed. I completely agree: but having finished the book, I feel like this Ancient Mariner took me on a wild goose chase.
Once again, Sully offers a story completely unlike anything before it. The book falls into three sections. In the first, we are introduced to Stephanas, a orphan boy living in the care of two elderly aunts quite unfit for the job. One day, Stephanas sneaks out the back gate of their garden, wanders into a poor neighborhood, is accosted by some local bullies, then latches onto Marge, a girl who rescues him by threatening the boys with a brick. Stephanas slides right into Marge’s family, sitting down to bread and drippings for tea. Soon, he becomes a daily visitor, helping with the washing up and bringing items from the large collection of antique china his aunts have inherited as offerings.
In this section, Stephanas seems a rather resilient kid, growing increasingly independent from his aunts as they grow less and less capable of taking care of him, let alone themselves. Their petty interferences drive away their one servant, who leaves them with a piece of her mind: “… they were completely mad. They ought to be shut away where they could do harm to none except themselves. And as for them having the charge of a poor innocent child! Words failed her.” Aunt Rose’s hearing begins to fail; Aunt Clara grows blinder each day. Merely fixing two meals a day becomes an ordeal, and Stephanas steals change from their purses to buy enough food to keep himself from starving. When Rose finds Clara dead, it takes Rose four days to comprehend the fact. It takes Stephanas five days to notice Clara’s absence.
Leap forward some years. Stephanas returns from college to open the aunt’s house and get it ready for sale. He seduces Marge, decides he’s not interested in her, fantasizes about Marge’s mother, then heads off into the world. He proceeds almost at random through a few unsuitable relationships, then sets his mind on marrying Edna, a headstrong farm girl he encounters in Somerset. Yet after he sleeps with her, he claims to be married already and unable to obtain a divorce. They settle into a cottage together, Edna has his child, and spend some happy years. One day Stephanas informs Edna that he had lied about being married. She takes their son and returns to her father’s farm. There is some tedious back-and-forth squabbling and negotiation, and they reach a truce.
Then the war (the Second World War, never mentioned in specific) breaks out. If Stephanas seemed to have an approach to relationships as odd as his name, his attitude towards military service is even harder to fathom. He considers going into hiding. He enlists. Then he decides to escape to Ireland and desert. Running into Marge on the way, he drags her along. Then he changes his mind. Then he returns to his unit and is shipped overseas. After years, he comes back to Somerset and there is more back-and-forth with Edna. He thinks he wants her back. She thinks she wants to marry a farmer. Oh, by the way, we learn that their child had somehow been killed in the war. Stephanas goes off on a walkabout to lose himself. Then he changes his mind. By which point it’s momentum alone that will keep a reader from giving up.
And by which point it becomes clear that Kathleen Sully somehow lost her way in the course of writing Burden of the Seed. What started as an emotionally compelling story, sort of Great Expectations brought forward sixty years, became a meander in search of a protagonist. Young Stephanas has spunk. Adult Stephanas is emotionally damaged and incapable of knowing his own mind for much more than a day or two at a time. Edna is the one level-headed character in the book, but you have to wonder why she doesn’t show Stephanas the door, which would have brought the book to a close around page 100. There is some good writing her, but Kathleen Sully’s assembly is too jury-rigged to stand the test of time. I have to give Burden of the Seed a solid “Justly Neglected” rating, I’m afraid.
This is a test.