The characters in A Way Through the Wood: Careless People

Yesterday I referred to The Great Gatsby in discussing narrative voice in Nigel Balchin's A Way Through the Wood (1951), by way of contrast - Nick Carraway's first-person narration is a rare example of a first-person narrator - not the author - with a deep and complex literary style whereas Balchin's first-person narrator - not the author - is a more straightforward style, sometimes with the arch, cynical tone of an American noir detective. It's probably not by chance that I thought of Gatsby when reading Way Through the Wood: the narrative styles may differ but the characters themselves, w/ their moral obtuseness, narcissism, and bigotry are much like Fitzgerald's characters in Gatsby. This novel centers on a fatal car accident - the driver kills a man and takes off and much of the "moral" issue of the novel concerns how to protect her identity. Throughout the long passages of the novel as the narrator, Jim Manning, tries to repair his marriage there's hardly a thought about the accident, the guilt one might or should feel, the obligation to report the crime, and so forth. As Carroway ways about the Buchanans: They're careless people. Though I can recognize the nearly untenable position of Jim - should he encourage his estranged wife to report the crime? - it's hard to feel an iota of sympathy for him or for any of his set, including wife (Jill) and her lover (Bill). Much of their hatefulness derives from their extreme class prejudice. They pretty much think their guilt over the death can be assuaged by a payment of 2 pounds a month to the widow (who is a housekeeper for the Mannings). Stop and ask: How do you think they'd act and react if a working-class man ran down a "upper class" man and killed him? Their condescension to workers and servants, thinking themselves to be great benefactors and thinking they're beloved by those whom they employ is astonishing, and one can only hope that there's at least a touch of irony in Balchin's depiction of class relationships. In fact the only truly noble action in the entire novel is the widow's refusal to press charges and to seek revenge or even redress. As a final note, we learn at the end that the entire narration is a record Jim is preparing to submit to the court in his application for divorce; if he actually does submit it, he's telling the court that his wife was the driver in the fatal hit and run (and in fact that both he and Bill withheld evidence) - though the latter two are safely out of reach in Switzerland. Nice peopl. 

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