Books: Winter's Tale

A woman In the Sky by James Hanley 223 pages, Horizon Press $6.95

As if it were a darkened empty stage, A Woman in the Sky begins with voices discussing an unfortunate old lady who jumped out the window of her lonely cell in Totall Point, a drab, new high-rise apartment in London. Gradually the voices become characters. Scenery is sketched in, and the reader eventually learns that the old lady was a Mrs. Kavanagh, a 76-year-old alcoholic with a string of arrests for public drunkenness. The Housing Council relocted Mrs. Kavanagh in totall Point after her small house was flattened by progress. Like so many of the aged and helpless, she had in effect been buried in the sky.

Yet what begins in seedy depression evolves into the story of an extraordinary friendship. In addition to the comfort of the bottle, Mrs. Kavanagh had Mrs. Biddulph, a regular drinking buddy whenever she was not serving short sentences for shoplifiting. The two women were different but complementary. Mrs Kavanagh was vulnerable because she was friendly. Her last pinch at the hands of the police came about because she made a public nuisance of herself by muzzily trying to shake strangers hands. Mrs Biddulph survives on a generalized anger about the state's institutuion compassion and the pathetic efforts of the well-meaning.

There is no shortage of well-meaning people in British Novelist James Hanley's latest book: bobbies judges, probation officers and clergymen, even a kind neighbor who wants to befriend Mrs. Biddulph, after being shaken by the sight of her friend lying broken on the pavement. Mrs. B. rejects them all, apparently because they cannot substitute anything as authentic as her own bitter loneliness.

Yet Mrs. B. is profoundly vulnerable to Mrs. K.'s deluded belief that she has a son somewhere at sea. At Mrs. K.'s request, her friend even writes letters to the nonexistent son; they are signed "your fond mother," but never posted.

Instead she keeps them in a box. After Mrs. Kavanagh's death, the letters take on a deepened significance, especially the following passage: "Yesterday I stood looking out of the window where I am, and I wished you'd come round the corner, quick, a surprise, I'd have gone on my tiptoes to shout your name out of the window. Love, that I would, since people round here think I haven't a son at all, that's what they're like these days, can't even dream about nice things happening these times."

Liverpool Conrad. The narrow line between private reveries at the window and actually stepping over the sill threads subtly throughout the book. As in a great deal of good fiction, the novel grows out of character, not plot or theme. Those who have read any of Hanley's more than 40 other novels should not be surprised. At 73, he is one of the most consistently praised and least-known novelists in the English-speaking world. Born in Dublin and raised in Liverpool, Hanley became a merchant seaman at age 13, just before World War I. He is self-educated. Over the years he has written his way through any number of literary fashions. Some early sea stories have been compared to Conrad, though they are far less romantic. Hanley has been called a proletarian writer, too, mainly on the raw strengths of a fictional tetralogy about the hard lives of Irish workers in Liverpool, which began in the 1930s with The Furys.