Hatter’s Castle by A. J. Cronin

 Hatter’s Castle by A. J. Cronin

George Bernard Shaw once said some intriguing things about Hitler, in a televised speech that I saw in a documentary about him.

Shaw was a…show off. In the same film, he was turning around and saying to the camera this is my left side, now my front… on Hitler he had some good things to say, shockingly.

But in a coup de grace, Shaw wended by saying something along these lines:

-          the only other thing is that: humanity would have been better off if Hitler had never existed

The same thing can be said about James Brodie, the main character in Hatter’s Castle. He is perfect, to borrow Shaw’s irony, but only as a negative personage.

It is difficult to think of someone else who is so evil, even if names do come to mind: Saruman, Mephisto, and Jack Nicholson aka Johnny in The Shining…as it happens, the test on myself provided two non-human roles.

Yes, most of time we have a negative counterpart for the positive hero, but somebody so completely evil is rare, at least in my memory, they tend to be more complex. Take Faust- he makes a deal with the devil, but he has some human sides and wants something good out of making alliances with evil.

James Brodie is nothing but selfishness, stupid pride, pure meanness, base feelings, foul mouth, violent behavior and lack of interest for members of his own family.

You would say this is a lesson in How Not To Live Your Life, which is otherwise a rather entertaining and funny British comedy series.

When Mary Brodie is having an excellent track record in school, her father, Brodie keeps saying “we”, about her results. He assumes all the glory and refuses to have anything to do with what he calls failures.

The same thing happens when Mary’s younger sister gets good grades in school, the “we „did it shows up again. When Mary has an affair with a decent Irish man, her father gets nasty and insults the young man, proving how snobbish, arrogant and hateful he can be.

In a way I am glad that he was played, in the Radio adaptation that I have listened to today, by Mircea Albulescu- an actor that I do not esteem and who has something repelling for me, but this bit of nastiness gave an additional “aura” of evil to a terrible man like Brodie.

There are some flowers in this field dominated by this Saruman, agent of evil. These are the daughters, the wife and, come to think of it, almost anybody else in the book comes across as an angel when compared with this Marquis de Sade…at least the Marquis was using his methods on other, sometimes willing (?) partners, whereas James the Bad, has been torturing his own relatives and they were far from willing to take any of this, in fact they took measures against his continuing cruelty.

I will not delve into the details of what happened, who loved outside the “accepted circle of designated suitors” to avoid a spoiler.

As mentioned, this is a Guide on How to Torture your Family and Friends, but some light is cast upon the novel by the family of the Mad Mean Man.

It was an interesting audition of the radio adaptation, although I feel I would not be able to put up with the longer, unabridged book. Perhaps you would and enjoy it.

My feelings about this work are rather mixed.