E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote "The Kingdom of the Blind" in 1916. One thing I have noticed about him as an author is that he often tries experimenting. He is exceedingly aware of how the minutiae of the story are affecting the readers predictions of the outcomes, opinions of the characters, and such. He occasionally will try flipping it and playing with them. Which is what he does with this book.
It starts with a dinner party, at which we are introduced to some characters- namely, Geraldine Conyers, Surgeon-Major Thomson, and Captain Granet.
Geraldine Conyers is typical of Oppenheim's books and the books of the time period, the fashionable young lady of society.
Where Oppenheim turns the book strange is that the normal way books are, is that the good character often will be likable, outgoing, friendly, with a cheerful disposition. Something that draws people away from a character, is things like being reserved, cold, emotionless, cruel, devious, lying. Things like being reserved can be portrayed in an enigmatic sense, so it is not necessarily a bad trait for a character to have. But often, the good traits will be with the good character, while the bad traits that direct the reader into disliking the character is given to the person who ends up being the bad character.
It is a devious way to direct the reader subconsciously into liking a character or not without openly making them likable or not. So if a character has some of the negative character traits, and turns out to be the main bad person in the book, I generally am content with the ending.
What Oppenheim does in "Kingdom of the Blind", is entirely flip this common notion that he and many other authors used all the time on its head.
That was my main problem with this book. It is experimentation by Oppenheim to make you like the bad person, and dislike the good one.
Surgeon-Major Thomson all along is shown to be cold, calculating, and emotionless. He lies constantly, even to Geraldine Conyers who he is courting.
Captain Granet is cheerful, friendly, polite, and nice to everyone he meets. Throughout the book he shows no negative personality traits, and did nothing except to make me like his character more as the book went along.
Surgeon-Major Thomson openly accuses him of being a traitor to England, by informing Germany of military things, in spite of an honorable time in the British army, in which he was was captured.
He does this without any evidence. Captain Granet handles this well, and politely. Geraldine is naturally indignant at the absurd claims, and breaks off their engagement.
She then, maybe feeling some degree of regret, makes a heartfelt and emotional plea to him.
"I think that the real reason why I lost some of my affection for you was because you persisted in treating me without any confidence at all. And you told me nothing. There were things which seemed to demand an explanation with regard to your position. You ignored them. You seemed to enjoy moving in a mysterious atmosphere. It's worse than ever now. I am intelligent, am I not — trustworthy?"
She asked him if there was anything he wished to tell her, any sort of explanation of his recent actions at all.
All he does is say "Thank you for saying this. You are trustworthy. I have nothing to say to you."
Captain Granet on the other hand, is openly in love with her, though very respectful of Thomson.
It gets to the point that about halfway through, I am disappointed that a sniper's bullet, which you later find out was from Granet, just missed Thomson. But because he is such a rude, unfeeling character.
Captain Granet finally gets exposed by Thomson when Granet is coming to save the life of Geraldine. Of course, it was because of something he did, but he was going to help her, and Thomson exposes him and essentially tells him to go kill himself.
That is basically what ends up happening, and the character I have grown to despise gets the nice, happy ending off with the girl happy ever after.
By the end of the book I was practically throwing it into the wall. This was the utter paragon of one character to hate and one character to love and he picked the one I hated as the one to end up happy.
But it is masterfully written in terms of even though Granet did some very horrible things, I did not care. I hated Thomson, because of all the hints, subconscious or obvious that Oppenheim gave, that is what he wanted. He wanted to experiment, to see what would happen if he switched the personalities of the typical good and bad characters. And the result to me is just that, and experiment. Also, my least favorite book by Oppenheim. And an experiment that I will not be interested in reading again.
There is a reason formulas exist and persist: they satisfy, they have deep roots in our culture and, for that matter (if it's a love story) in our biology.
ReplyDeleteThere are only a few templates for plots out there, and the trick for the writer is to imaginatively vary the details or find exotic settings or unusual characters to set into motion within those templates.
One has to admire EPO's desire to experiment with the basics, to give the good guy a black hat and the bad guy a white hat, so to speak. The truth about an experiment, as opposed to a demonstration, is that failure is a possibility and that the answer is not discovered until all the work is done.
Sounds like a definite failure from what you say. But give this favorite of yours credit for not being a slave of his own success at formula fiction!
I couldn't help thinking as I read your review of what happened to fictional heroes within a few decades of this experiment. Heroes often became rats (Jimmy Cagney in the movies held a patent on this), or tormented (have you read Raymond Chandler yet?), or total brutes (Mickey Spillane?), or anti-heroes (my favorite in this line, as you will know, is Richard Stark's protagonist Parker) or reluctant heroes (many Alfred Hitchcock movies, my favorite being 'The 39 Steps.')
In other words, EPO might have sensed a shift in the cultural winds. Putting that in a different way, by 1916--certainly after the extraordinarily dreadful Battle of the Somme, it was getting harder and harder to see much glory or heroism in the world.
I can't quite leave this without mentioning Geoffrey Household's extraordinary 'Rogue Male,' written sometime in the 30s and featuring a hero who is nameless and apparently unsuccessful, but whose ingenuity and courage triumph when triumph is utterly impossible (or so it would seem!)
ReplyDeleteI think I said before how Oppenheim is considered the inventor of the "Rogue Male" school of adventure thrillers. Sort of interesting. On another note for author trivia, I mentioned another author I read, Mary Roberts Rinehart, who lived in Bar Harbor. She actually is credited with creating the phrase: "The butler did it."
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