by S. T. Joshi
For a relatively short novel, The Sundial features a bewildering array of characters, not all of whom are depicted quite as fully and three-dimensionally as one could have wished. It would be helpful to keep in mind the various figures who strut throughout the novel:
Richard Halloran, son of the deceased builder of the house, now confined to a wheelchair and with a tenuous hold on reality.
Mrs. Orianna Halloran, Richard’s wife and the dominant figure (in every sense of the term) in the work, always seeking to maintain her preeminence against all challengers.
Fanny Halloran, Richard’s sister, an unmarried and aging woman (she is forty-eight but seems and acts older), snobbish and intolerant, striving as best she can to battle with Orianna for supremacy in the household, and the one who claims to have heard the prophecy of cataclysm from the ghost of her dead father.
Maryjane Halloran, widow of Richard and Orianna’s son Lionel. She is a flighty ex-librarian who seeks only to gain whatever she can from the family she has married into.
Fancy Halloran, Maryjane’s young daughter, seemingly a sweet, innocent child but also animated by cold self-interest.
Essex, a young man hired to catalogue the library and who aims to sidle up to whoever he believes can improve his own fortunes.
Miss Ogilvie, Fancy’s governess, timid and put upon.
At later stages of the novel, several other individuals appear on the scene and take up residence in the house:
Mrs. Willow, a friend of Orianna, plain-speaking and a bit coarse.
Arabella and Julia, her daughters; Arabella is the pretty one, Julia the smart one.
Gloria Desmond, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Orianna’s cousin, seemingly endowed with psychic powers.
Captain Scarabombardon, a stranger whom Fanny has brought to the house from the village, apparently for reproductive purposes when the new Eden dawns. His name is fictitious, having been arbitrarily assigned to him by Fanny.
There are any number of other minor characters—chiefly various denizens of the nearby village—but they play very small roles in the action.
The novel opens strikingly with the bland assertion by Maryjane (an assertion believed by her daughter, Fancy) that Orianna has killed her own son, Lionel, by pushing him down the stairs. Was this done in order to allow Orianna unfettered dominance in the household? It would certainly appear so. Her very name is no accident, for it clearly evokes Gloriana, the nickname given to Queen Elizabeth I. The name Oriana is a character (a British princess) in the mediaeval Spanish romance Amadis de Gaula (c. 1304) and was used in a musical work, The Triumphes of Oriana (1601), a collection of madrigals assembled by Thomas Morley and dedicated to Elizabeth I.
Orianna’s heartlessness and dismissiveness toward the remaining members of the household are amply displayed by her appalling comment about her own son (“We could very well do without Lionel” [14]) and by her subsequent plans to dismiss Essex, put Miss Ogilvie in a cheap boarding house, banish Aunt Fanny to the tower room, send Maryjane back to the library where she worked before marrying Lionel, and keep Fancy for herself as the ultimate heir of the house.
It is shortly after this revelation that Fanny, in the garden near the eponymous sundial, has the vision (or fantasy) that her dead father is speaking to her, declaring that there is danger everywhere except in the house. Although Orianna scoffs at the vision, a snake suddenly emerging out of the fireplace convinces Maryjane that Fanny is speaking the truth. Soon thereafter, Fanny hears the prophecy that governs the subsequent action in the novel:
Aunt Fanny was listening to her father, repeating to them what he told her. With a happy smile on her face and her eyes shut, she listened with a child’s care, and spoke slowly, word for word. Aunt Fanny’s father had come to tell these people that the world outside was ending. Neither Aunt Fanny nor her father expressed any apprehension, but the world which had seemed so unassailable to the rest of them, the usual, daily world of houses and cities and people and all the small fragments of living, was to be destroyed in one night of utter disaster. Aunt Fanny smiled, and nodded, and listened, and told them about the end of the world. (35)
Soon thereafter she concludes ruefully: “Humanity, as an experiment, has failed” (36).
Because of this revelation, Fanny seems to be gaining the upper hand in the household; indeed, it is stated that Orianna had “no choice” (41) but to believe Fanny. But Orianna quickly seizes the moment. To her it is of no consequence whether Fanny’s prophecy is true or false; all she is concerned about is emerging on top when the new dispensation (if there is any) comes.
It is at this point that the Willow family and, soon thereafter, Gloria Desmond appear. Gloria occupies a critical function in the novel, seemingly confirming the prophecy by participating in a kind of spiritualist exercise whereby she looks deeply into a mirror taken from the wall and placed flat on a table. By this means she ascertains that the day of reckoning will be a few months from the time the novel opens—specifically, August 30. It is here that the supernatural appears to enter into the novel. One of Gloria’s visions depicted the family sitting placidly at breakfast; some weeks later, that precise scenario, with numerous details from Gloria’s vision, occurs (139). Still later, Gloria tells Fancy that she has never seen Orianna in any of her visions of the world after August 30 (171)—a point that will gain relevance later.
Although the novel focuses almost relentlessly on the multifarious struggles for power, influence, and supremacy within the Halloran household and their rambling house and capacious grounds, the unnamed village nearby also comes in for some attention. A long and otherwise anomalous passage going into elaborate detail about a teenage girl, Harriet Stuart, who killed her family but was acquitted (70f.) is evidently meant to suggest that the moral, intellectual, and cultural level of the villagers is even lower than that of the aristocratic Hallorans.
Numerous other passages reinforce this impression. On a trip to the village, Miss Ogilvie—in spite of strict instructions to the contrary—speaks of the coming cataclysm with a drugstore clerk; and although she explicitly declares (in accordance with Jackson’s own anti-religious bent) that it would be nothing like the Last Judgment (84), the clerk tells his mother, who is a member of a small club called the True Believers, whose (admittedly unorthodox) Christian leanings are unmistakable. In a grotesque episode where some of the True Believers visit the Halloran house, it is revealed that they believe that spacemen from Saturn are coming to take them away. “We wish you a pleasant journey,” Orianna says with bland sarcasm (93).
In a party thrown for the villagers on the day before the expected cataclysm, Essex takes great pleasure in teasing a number of the villagers. He soberly declares that Miss Ogilvie’s taciturnity has an odd source: “Miss Ogilvie as a child was violated by a band of Comanche Indians in a lonely farmhouse on Little Wicked Bend River” (187). This and other obviously fabricated tales are credulously believed by the villagers.
But if the villagers are contemptible in numerous ways, the denizens of the Halloran household are scarcely less so. The fact that, by general consensus, the thousands of books in the library are not only removed but burned to make way for supplies that will presumably be needed after the cataclysm is a pungent symbol for the collapse of intellect that is overrunning all members of the household in the wake of Fanny’s preposterous prophecy. Various characters from time to time do express a mild scepticism about the veracity of the prophecy, but their views are summarily rejected by the others.
The character exhibiting the greatest skepticism is Julia Willow, who declares flatly at one point (in reference to herself and the Captain): “We don’t believe that crap, any of it” (122). Orianna, now in total charge of the situation, declares that Julia is free to leave with the Captain; in fact, she cleverly gives the Captain a check for an unspecified but apparently enormous sum of money, blandly remarking: “We are not going to need it any more” (125). The very size of this check causes the Captain to
have doubts of his own scepticism: If Orianna is so convinced of the coming cataclysm, perhaps it would be prudent to stay on at the house? He does so, leaving Julia in the lurch.
Julia is nevertheless determined to leave by herself, and Orianna provides her with a driver from the village to take her to a larger “city” some distance away. Is Jackson setting up a scenario whereby it becomes (supernaturally) impossible for anyone to leave the house? Let us examine precisely what happens to Julia. The Captain’s desertion of her is a significant blow, but she tries to carry on in his absence. The driver of the car proves to be a surly individual who attempts to take advantage of the situation by demanding an increasingly higher fee for his services, to the point that Julia abruptly leaves the car and proceeds on foot. At this point a certain surreal atmosphere supervenes, but what has really happened is that simply gets lost in the dark and falls down a steep hill toward the river. She awakens the next morning back at the Halloran house, with Orianna delivering a snide and gloating taunt: “My dear . . . if you continue uncooperative I shall not let you go to the city again” (137). Nothing supernatural has actually occurred—it is nothing more than Julia’s (and, by extension, any other potentially skeptical character’s) physical and emotional weakness that prevents them from leaving the house in the face of the collective insanity overwhelming its denizens.
In a revealing passage, Essex recites the motto (from Chaucer) that adorns the sundial:
What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, with-outen any companye.
Orianna makes a deliberately ambiguous comment. “‘I do not care for it,’ Mrs. Halloran said, caressing the W of WORLD” (149). This could mean either that she does not care for the quotation or that she does not care for the world—i.e., that she is herself a misanthrope, or at best a cynic and a pessimist. The latter interpretation is emphasised when Essex asks, in reference to the world following the cataclysm, “Do you think we will be happy there?” Orianna replies: “No . . . But then, we are not happy here” (149–50). The new world will be pretty much as wretched and miserable as the old.
It is young Gloria who, a little surprisingly, expresses the most pungent misanthropy in the novel. In a remarkable discussion with Fancy about the outside world, Gloria offers a blanket condemnation:
“There’s nothing there,” Gloria said with finality. “It’s a make-believe world, with nothing in it but cardboard and trouble.” She thought for a minute, and then said, “If you were a liar, or a pervert, or a thief, or even just sick, there wouldn’t be anything out there you couldn’t have.”
Fancy bent over the doll house. “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t care how shabby it is. I’m not afraid of bad people, and of not being safe.”
“But there aren’t any good people,” Gloria said helplessly. “No one is anything but tired and ugly and mean. I know.” (167)
But if the outside world offers nothing of value, the Halloran house (and household) is little better. At the very outset we are told that, in the opinion of its builder, the house “should contain everything” (8)—in other words, it is itself a microcosm of the world at large. And the motley array of denizens in the house, for all the aristocratic pretensions of some of them, is a fittingly vile amalgam of the varied human failings embodied by the villagers.
The climax of the novel only augments the general misanthropy underpinning it. By this time, all doubt as to the reality of the impending cataclysm has disappeared, and a kind of mob mentality has taken over the entire Halloran household: even those who had previously expessed skepticism are doing nothing but planning for life after the destruction of the world.
In a stunning confirmation of Gloria’s vision, which suggested that Orianna would not be around following the cataclysm, Orianna is found dead on the fateful day of August 30. She has been pushed down the stairs, exactly as she presumably pushed her own son some weeks earlier. Who is the culprit? Without saying so, Jackson strongly implies it is little Fancy. Perhaps taking hints from the image of corrupted innocence in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Jackson has throughout the novel portrayed Fancy as far from the sweet little girl she appears. At the very outset her ruthless megalomania is etched keenly: “Fancy ran her hand richly along the soft hearth rug. ‘It’s going to belong to me when my grandmother dies,’ she said. ‘When my grandmother dies, no one can stop the house and everything from being mine’” (17). And who else but Fancy could have been responsible for the existence of a doll, clearly representing Orianna, that is stuck full of pins and placed on the sundial (104–5)? Orianna may in fact have signed her own death-warrant when she told Fancy that the crown (really just a gold band) she is wearing to symbolise her own supremacy in the household will go to Fancy only “When I am dead” (200). Sure enough, Fancy snatches up the crown from the dead Orianna’s head without the slightest remorse or grief: “‘My crown!” Fancy said suddenly, and bolted down the stairs” (216). If Fancy is the kind of ruler that the new dispensation offers, the new world will truly be no better than the old.
But is that cataclysm actually going to occur? Jackson deliberately keeps the reader in suspense to the end; she merely concludes the novel with a scene in which the remaining denizens of the Halloran household exchange utterly trivial and fatuous small talk while waiting stolidly for the destruction of the world. Jackson enjoys teasing the reader with suggestions that that cataclysm may in fact be coming. In the days leading up to the climactic August 30, strange phenomena are noted throughout the nation:
Toward the end of August the weather turned strange; various and unusual phenomena were reported from one end of the country to the other: freak snow storms, hurricanes, hail from a clear sky. . . . There were cases of death from heat and death from drowning and death from wind in each morning’s newspaper, along with statements that the earth’s surface was being lowered into the oceans at the rate of two inches a century; a volcano which had been dormant for five hundred years erupted, blasted its surrounding countryside, and fell asleep again forever. (179)
This may be an amusing anticipation of global warming, but Jackson knows (and expects her skeptical readers to know) that each one of these incidents can be plausibly be accounted for naturalistically. And in that final scene there is one more hint of the cataclysm:
“I thought I heard a crash,” Julia said, turning her hands nervously.
“Probably one of the trees going down,” Aunt Fanny said. “The best thing for you, dear, is to try not to notice. Try to think of something else.” (221)
The crash of a single tree is insufficient to establish the extraordinary notion that the entire world is somehow coming to an end; and Fanny’s deadpan response is only a further indication of her utter failure to realise the truly apocalyptic nature of the calamity she herself professes to believe in.
The Sundial portrays a humanity that has proven itself a failed experiment, both in and out of the Halloran household, so that it scarcely makes a difference whether the cataclysm predicted by Fanny occurs or not. For all the elaborate preparations that the Hallorans engage in to ensure the renewal of the race, there is little indication that—if that apocalypse were actually to happen—the new crop of human beings would be much better than the old. And the high probability that the Hallorans are merely waiting around delusionally for a new dispensation that is only a product of their neurotic imaginations points to Jackson’s refusal to single out any member of our species, however high-born or self-important, as much better than his or her fellows. It is a cheerless vision of humanity that Jackson portrays in The Sundial, but it is also a fitting vehicle for the mordant satire that she wielded with customary aplomb.
Some Novels by L. P. Davies
A. Who Is Lewis Pinder? (1965)
In a career spanning little more than two decades, from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, L. P. Davies (1914–1988) published hundreds of short stories and more than a score of n
ovels. While the novels, in particular, reached a wide audience, most of them being published on both sides of the Atlantic and several being translated into other languages, Davies has never received the critical acclaim that is rightfully his. Very likely this is largely due to the fact that his work is of such a unique kind—a seamless melding of mystery, horror, and science fiction that cannot be likened to the work of any other writer and whose distinctiveness makes it immediately recognisable as the product of a powerful and original imagination.
Who Is Lewis Pinder? (1965)—also published under the title Man out of Nowhere—is in many ways representative of Davies’s work. It broaches his signature element—amnesia—a motif that he treats in novel after novel, always with ingenious variations. This work, however, is striking in that it is focused not so much on the actual amnesiac—named Lewis Pinder by baffled doctors when he is found unconscious in a field, dressed only in an old grey suit and wearing no shoes—but upon the police investigation into his background and circumstances. Who Is Lewis Pinder? is virtually a police procedural, intently following the dogged efforts of Detective-Sergeant Roger Fenn of the C.I.D. to discover who exactly Pinder is and how he could have ended up in the small town of Ringmill. Fenn’s investigations reveal, perhaps, more than he bargained for; for it seems that Pinder is not a single individual, but four different people, each of whom has been dead for twenty years or more. It is this bizarre premise that sets the stage for one of the most staggering denouements in all Davies’s work.
Davies may have chosen the theme of amnesia because it carries a uniquely terrifying implication: as one of the nurses examining Pinder observes, it is as if his mind has been wiped clean. Davies has hereby identified perhaps the central feature in every human being’s sense of self: without our memories, dating back to infancy and progressing through adolescence and into adulthood, we are nothing. How can we consider ourselves distinct individuals without the specific memories that have made us what we are? When, toward the end of the novel, Pinder is referred to as “soulless,” Davies has come to the heart of the matter: the very essence of our personality is linked to all the events, and the memory of those events, that we have experienced. In spite of Davies’s deliberately clipped and laconic prose, he is capable of poignant reflections on Pinder’s plight, as when the amnesiac ponders his fate as he is writing in a diary: