Having now read a full dozen of Kathleen Sully’s 17 books, I’m beginning to see the outlines of her moral universe. Though it’s rich in comic circumstances and peopled more by the good than the evil, there is never more than a razor’s edge separating life from death, never more than a chance accident separating life’s winners from its losers. The Undesired is an object lesson in how to survive in her world — and how not to.
Stanley Chubb is one of the losers. A meek little man, he is so little noticed when retiring after thirty years in the same government office that a co-worker mumbles “See you Monday, Chub” as he leaves. He is as alone in the world as one can be: “… he was an old man without close friends or relatives — a lone man at the end of his life and usefulness, traveling in a train to a small flat in a nondescript street. He had done nothing worth recounting; he had see nothing worth remembering. He was nothing — a speck in the universe, less than a speck — merely a point in space.” Faced with a future in which he will simply “moulder away as if he had never been born,” he decides he must “blast this world wide open.”
He heads into the West Country and picks a little resort village on the coast to settle in, taking a decrepit cottage without electricity or running water and pledging to engage with the people there instead of receding into the background as he’s done all his life. Soon after, another retiree, the erect and tweedy Agnes Strathers — universally called “Horse” behind her back — shows up and demands to know if the cottage is for sale. She, too, is one of the undesired: “unlucky enough to feel alone in the world, unwanted, unlovely, unloved.”
Sully weaves Stanley, Agnes, and the growing circle of people they become involved with through an intricate choreography of encounters, misunderstandings, and accidents, but the real story here is far simpler than that. The Undesired is about nothing more than learning to survive by reaching out to the people around us — for help and to help.
But Sully will not let her readers be lulled by the soft glow of a happy ending. Just as the book closes, she draws our attention to another solitary visitor, a plain, grey nameless woman like Agnes, and leaves us with a grim reminder that we are never more than a step or two from death’s grasp. I recommend reading The Undesired in a warm place: a cold and bitter draft runs through this book.