The Visitor

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A good novella should be as compact and elegant as a perfect cocktail and pack just such a punch. Novellas such as Nabokov’s Transparent Things, Turgenev’s A Russian Beauty and Chekhov’s Lady with Lapdog are slender telescopes on large and luminous worlds. Their success depends on perfect focus, physical and emotional. In the right hands they are infinitely superior to the vast numbers of pretentious and overweight novels being written today.

It would be difficult to find the equal of the three short works mentioned above, but The Visitor (discovered after the author’s death as an eighty-page typescript) merits a place in their company. As a study in desolation and monstrous selfishness it stands on its own.

The Visitor tells of Anastasia’s return to Dublin after the death of her mother. She had been in Paris comforting the distraught woman, who ran away from a disastrous marriage. Like a wounded animal blindly burrowing for shelter, Anastasia scurries back to the house in Ranelagh where she was raised. To the frightened twenty-two-year-old the suburban house spells just one thing: “home”. But “home” is now the preserve of her grandmother, Mrs King, an obtuse, religious, self-satisfied old woman who bears a grudge against her granddaughter for siding with the woman who took her only son away from her and then left him. She feels no pity for the young girl, only the strength of her own resentment and the need to avenge it. It soon becomes evident that it was the grandmother herself who destroyed her son’s marriage by a campaign of cruelty against Anastasia’s sensitive mother. Now she has a fresh victim. The ensuing cat-and-mouse game is made all the more horrifying by Anastasia’s determination to make a nest for herself in the only refuge she knows.

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