Safe Return Doubtful

Set on a Southern army base in the peacetime of the 1930s the narrative concentrates on six characters, each with their own demons, yearning for love in it’s various forms, and searching, without success, for salvation.

The bored and frustrated wife of the self-assured Captain Penderton, Leonora, is having an affair with Major Langdon, whose wife Alison is suffering great mental and physical fatigue. Meanwhile, on the periphery, is Private Williams, simple, young and menacing.

No one does loneliness like McCullers. So much so that her books are always quite depressing, yet brilliant I hasten to add. Specifically here, her characters are suffering various degrees of spiritual isolation, with the environment they are in playing a key role.

It’s worth remembering that though she was an established author of considerable renown (after the success of [book:The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter|37380]) when this was published, in 1941, she was still only 24 years old.

Probing into the caverns of human emotion this is, more so than her earlier work, ineffably bleak, and yet a book that screams to be read.
Such is the power of great literature.

Here’s a clip..

“You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?’…’I don’t agree”