The Counterplot
The Counterplot (1924) is Hope Mirrlees's second novel.
It is dedicated to Jane Harrison.
The epigraph, taken from Miguel de Unamuno, says: "Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much the better."
Story
The novel's protagonist is Teresa Lane, a woman of 28, living in Plasencia, a villa in the South-East of England, shortly after World War I, who studies the spectacle of her family life with the intent of transforming it into art. The result is a play, The Key, written by Teresa after the style of the Spanish autos sacramentales and set in Seville during the reign of Pedro the Cruel, the text of which is reproduced in its entirety within chapter eleven (and is almost 100 pages in length).
Religious element
As in Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists, religion plays a strong part in the story. (Which may, if anybody bothers to read it, illuminate certain aspects of Lud-in-the-Mist...)
- p.109
- And the plot? Well, that was not yet visible; but the forces behind it would be sex, religion, and the dead.
There is a passage wherein Mirrlees draws parallels between Jesus and a fairy:
- p.76-77
- Indeed, the sources and nature of the Doña's knowledge of Jesus was not unlike that of some old peasant woman of Palestine. The old woman, say, would, from time to time, ride into Nazareth on her donkey, carrying a basket of grapes and olives to sell in the market: and perhaps, if the basket should have fallen and scattered the fruit, or if she had a pitcher to fill at the fountain, she may have received a helping hand or a kindly word from the gentlest and strangest-spoken young man that had ever crossed her path.
- Then one day she may have paid her first visit to Jerusalem—perhaps a lawsuit over a boundary taking her there, or the need to present her orphaned grandchild in the Temple—and have seen this same young man let through the streets, bound with cords, while the populace shouted, "Cruficify Him! Crucify Him!" and have returned to her remote little farm with an ache in her heart.
- And, as the years would go by, from the tales of wayfarers, from rumours blown from afar, she might come to believe that somehow or other the young man had died for the poor—for her; had died and now risen again. And gradually, as with the years his legend grew, she would come to look upon him as a fairy-being, akin to the old sanctities of the countryside, swelling her grapes, plumping her olives, and keeping away locusts and blight. But, towards the end of her life, business may have taken her again to Nazareth, where, hearing that the young man's mother was still alive, something may have compelled her to go and visit her. And in the little room behind the carpenter's shot, where the other sons and grandsons were planing and sawing, and singing to ancient melodies of the desert songs of plenty and vengeance and the Messiah, the two old women would talk together in hushes tones of Him who so many years ago had been crucified and buried. And through the mother's anecdotes of His childhood and tearful encomiums, "He was ever a good kind son to me,"—the fairy-being would once more become human and ponderable—the gentlest young man that had ever crossed her path.
Reviews
- Snippets of old reviews
- In The American Mercury (1951), edited by George Jean Nathan, H L Mencken. Page xxxix:
- A novel that is a brilliant tour de force and also a finely wrought love story
- In Life Magazine, 1936, by Henry Robinson Luce:
- I commend wholeheartedly "The Counterplot," by Hope Mirrlees (Knopf). Here is something new in fiction
Editions
A French translation appeared in 1929 under the title Le choc en retour, tr. Simone Martin-Chauffier, published by Plon, Paris.
External links
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