Fiction folio

A wildness of dreams

Novels/Glen Cavaliero

           AN OBSESSION is the subject matter of Get Down There And Die.  David Carlisle, a nineteen-year-old doing temporary work in London, and emotionally and mentally uprooted, catches sight of a young man's face in agony, during the rush hour in the London Underground.

             He drops everything to follow the boy, and to trace if he can the source of his anguish.  This compulsive quest leads him first to the East End, and then to the West of Ireland.  This crazy and alarming journey ends up in a landscape of deep peace; but in it there lurks terror, and the surprising end to the search.

              Jennifer Lash writes very well, and her story carries real imaginative conviction, though the conclusion seems rather thin and its possibilities insufficiently exploited.  The book touches the borderland of fantasy, and it seems to mean more than it says.  It reminded me at times of the novels of that neglected mistress of the disturbing, Phyllis Paul.