By RAYMOND LAWRENCE, KATHERINE MOUNT (Bruce Humphries, Inc.; 1956)
No that title is not a typo—it is LIERS (not LIARS) IN WAIT. That’s not an inappropriate choice given the gist of this bizarre novel, an epic love story that freely partakes of mystery, horror, erotica and science fiction. The mixture is, to say the least, uneasy.
In essence, LIERS IN WAIT reads like a wartime romance a la A FAREWELL TO ARMS or FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, filtered through a morass of tortured Freudian philosophy. It begins in 1939, the start of WWII, at Scapa Run Abby, a cliffside castle located in Northern England whose primary attraction is a library containing books bound in human skin. In the Abby are gathered several aristocratic eccentrics, among them the dashing Major John Lawrence. He falls in love with another of the Abby’s inhabitants, the transplanted American Kay Munn, who rejects Lawrence’s marriage proposal because “How can there be any wrong in an unselfish girl giving herself to you without asking for the sordid protection of a legal ceremony?”
Also present is the Belgian Keetje, whose fate is forecast by the authors thusly: “On this beautiful morning it would have been difficult to convince anyone that within the next twenty-four hours the warm life would grow cold in the ruins of her highly desirable body.” Death is indeed watching her, and takes Keetje while bathing; the inhabitants of the castle initially proclaim her demise an accidental drowning, but that verdict is quickly revised.
From there John Lawrence finds himself stationed in Venice, where he makes the acquaintance of another batch of wealthy eccentrics, while Kay is lured by a job offer in South Carolina, where she stays at an allegedly haunted plantation known as Old Silence. Then, around the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the action shifts back to England, and, as the combat intensifies (“the buzz-bomb could catch you anywhere…You developed a morbid fear of being caught mother-naked by the Teutonic infamy”), back to Scapa Run Abby, where a violent destiny, and the end of the war, await.
What are we to make of this crazy-quilt mixture of tones, settings and narrative strands? I’m not sure, and neither, it seems, were the publishers. The book jacket promises a “fast moving novel of psychological suspense” and compares it to THE DECAMERON, while a blurb from Orson Welles dubs the book “brilliant and possessed of many moments of philosophical beauty.”
One wonders what Welles made of LIERS IN WAIT’s many odd and perverse narrative asides involving subsidiary characters. Among those characters are Keetje’s killer, whose lurid confession occurs in a Venetian church; a thirteen year old Southern boy who subdues his hated guardian by convincing her there’s a ghost afoot, and then, with the hag’s back to him, flogs her mercilessly; and a young woman in Scapa Run Abby who in an attempt at warding off annihilation by German bombs becomes “Carried away by religious frenzy, a mystical frenzy that seemed unwilling or unable to spend itself,” and takes to fanatically praying stark naked.
As if all that weren’t enough, we also get several lengthy stories-within-stories that take the form of dreams experienced by Lawrence. Those dream-stories involve a forbidden relationship between a young nun and her mother superior, a sixteenth century French duchess who falls in love with a dashing soldier who’s not long for this world, and an illegal fur trader romancing a rich girl in eighteenth century Philadelphia. The inclusion of these stories would seem to render this a “fix-up” novel, meaning a novel-length narrative cobbled together from unrelated short stories, although the authors do offer an explanation for Lawrence’s “dreams,” and you can rest assured that explanation (involving fourth dimensional psychic transference) is completely and thoroughly nutty—and so very much in keeping with book overall.