Charlotte Moore

Too good for words

I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point.

issue 15 January 2011

I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point.

I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point.

The strapline tells me to expect a tale of ‘greed, goodness, and an extraordinary miracle’. Well, it doesn’t seem to be about greed at all. There isn’t a greedy person in it. Needy, yes; it deals with need. ‘Goodness’ is more like it. It is an analysis of goodness, and more specifically of kindness, of the moral interconnectedness of human beings.

The ‘extraordinary miracle’ (is there any other sort?) befalls Tommy Carr, the ‘kind man’ of the title, a man who has ‘a deep sense of what was good or even holy but no connection with any church or chapel’.

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