Book review: A tale of relationships told through murder

Tony & Susan
Austin Wright
Atlantic Books
384 pages
Rs399

In a laudatory blurb on the cover, Saul Bellow vouches that the novel is ‘marvellously written’ and ‘beautiful’ — the last thing you would expect in a story of blood and revenge. Actually, the story of blood and revenge is only one track in the book, a story within a story.

The other, more interesting track is about Susan and her two marriages. The book opens with Susan receiving a manuscript from Edward, the husband she divorced more than 20 years ago, asking for her opinion on the novel he has written. His pretension of being a writer was one of the reasons their marriage went bust. How could she prevent her prejudices from coming in the way of an unbiased read?

Her present husband, Arnold, goes out of town for a medical conference and she finds herself in imminent danger of being visited by Edward, so she wills herself to read her ex’s tale of blood and revenge. She gets drawn into the life of the spineless professor-protagonist, Tony, whose wife and daughter have been raped and killed.

While Susan reads and makes value-judgments about Tony and Edward, the readers of Austin Wright’s book get drawn into Susan’s life. A mother of three, with an orderly schedule , Susan seems like an archetypal American wife-mother. But, as her life unfolds in a parallel track to the fictitious Tony’s, you realise that all is not well in paradise. The strong, capable Susan is living a life of compromise. She is as afraid as Tony to rock the boat by taking tough decisions. He is cowardly. So is she.

Through Tony’s dilemma, the writer raises questions about
justice and revenge. Should a civilised professor take the law into his hands? However, these questions are raised towards the end of the book. For the most part, Tony comes through as a lackadaisical wimp, not overtly agonised by the brutal killings of his wife and child, and it is difficult to empathise with his dithering ways. These portions tend to make the book sag, and prevent it from being consistently arresting.

The novel’s strength lies in Wright’s empathy with the dilemma of an everyday woman, a wife who has been taken for granted by both her husbands. In her marriage with Edward, Susan was the bread-earner. In her marriage to Arnold she has to accept his affair with a colleague. “Censored, blackmailed, contained and jailed by the danger of saying a wrong word, a small complaint that would give Linwood the right to take charge,” writes Wright about Susan’s predicament. The final chapter that has Susan introspecting about her life is truly moving.