Book Review : A Farm of Loneliness in Australia

The Well by Elizabeth Jolley (Viking: $14.95)

Hester Harper, the unhappy protagonist of “The Well,” lives on the large farm she has inherited in Western Australia. She is a spinster. She is also a cripple; but her real crippling is internal.

As a child she was her father’s pet, but her handicap deprived him of an heir fit to work the farm properly. As she grew older, her status changed from pet to blight, like the arid weather. The blow to her pride made her withdraw into a prickly isolation of “self-examination and acts of contrition.”

Yet she wields a bleak kind of power. The farm, parched as it is, gives her a certain local prestige; and when she sells most of it to an ambitious neighbor, the profit makes her modestly affluent.

It also allows her to indulge her consuming passion. Before her father’s death, she had brought home a young girl from the orphanage, ostensibly to work around the house. “I’ve brought Katherine,” she tells the dying man. “I’ve brought Katherine, but she’s for me.”

Object of Obsession

Katherine, a pale, pretty waif, uneducated and self-absorbed, becomes Hester’s obsession. The older woman guards her, indulges her, dominates her. They spend the time sewing, listening to music, going to the movies, eating large meals and throwing the dishes, when excessively dirty, down an old well outside the house.

It is a way of dealing with life as well as dishes, and it is the theme of Elizabeth Jolley’s latest novel. With Katherine, Hester has retreated into a small, barricaded world in which she relives a childish, though hardly childlike vision of complete control; where each of her frustrations is turned into a fantasy.

Life infiltrates back through any denial of itself, though. Jolley, whose psychological precision verges on the relentless and makes “The Well” a taxing as well as an impressive experience, fashions both the denial and the infiltration into a Gothic horror.

The weak point of a fortress is its garrison. Katherine is docile and perhaps even grateful to her benefactor-worshiper, but she is selfish, tiny-brained and hungry for life outside. Hester, uncertain of her own power, indulges her. She agrees, despite herself, to a visit by one of Katherine’s orphanage friends, and she takes her to a dance nearby.

Vehicle Hits Man

It is coming back from the dance, with Katherine inexpertly driving, that the incident occurs that crumbles Hester’s armored paradise. Just outside the farmhouse, their jeep hits a man walking along in the dark. Hester panics. Helped by a terrified Katherine, they throw the victim--probably dead, although this is uncertain--down the well.

Up to this point, Jolley has told the story as if through Hester’s mind, with a kind of feverish logic. Hester’s domestic idyll is bizarre and claustrophobic, but it has been more or less under control. The effortfulness of the control, though, is apparent; it is a series of closed doors on the other side of which terrible things are happening.

Now, with the body in the well, the doors splinter. Hester’s maneuvers become wildly farfetched. A large amount of money that she had kept in the house is missing. Assuming that it was stolen by the man they hit, she insists that Katherine must climb down the well to recover it.

A nightmarish sequence follows. Hester drives into town for a rope; upon her return she finds Katherine, temporarily deranged, insisting that the man in the well is alive and that she has been talking to him. The girl’s raving hysteria and Hester’s suppressed hysteria blend in a dreamlike blackness in which reality and hallucination are indistinguishable.

Questions Unanswered

Was the man really alive? Did he steal the money? Did Katherine? A neighbor comes over and bolts down the well cover and the questions are left unanswered. What is clear is that Katherine will drift away, that Hester’s grimly maintained kingdom is destroyed, and that there is nothing to replace it.

A story of this kind risks melodrama. But Jolley, author of “Foxy Baby” and “Miss Peabody’s Inheritance” (which also tells of the passion of an isolated older woman for a young girl), is far too original and tightly coiled to fall into such a thing.

Under an extravagance that can sometimes seem incoherent, Jolley maneuvers a disciplined pattern of psychological perceptions and clues. Hester is both outlandish and entirely believable; though ultimately--and it is the book’s defect--our understanding leads to pity rather than sympathy.

“The Well,” in any event, is a striking portrait of loneliness and of the terrible price paid by fantasy when it attempts to substitute itself for life. The 1968 Paris street cry of “L’imagination au Pouvoir” was never fulfilled, but imagination, given a night stick and the power to legislate, risks turning totalitarian when it doesn’t risk turning into chaos.