The Parson

by Anna Kavan

The Parson was not published in Anna Kavan’s lifetime, but found after her death in manuscript form. Thought to have been written between the mid 50s and early 60s, it presages, through its undertones and imagery, some of Kavan’s last and most enduring fiction (such as Ice ). It was published finally, to wide acclaim, by Peter Owen in 1995. The Parson of the title is not a cleric, but an upright young army officer so nick-named for his apparent prudishness. On leave in his native homeland, he meets a rich and beguiling beauty, the woman of his dreams. The days that the Parson spends with Rejane, riding in and exploring the wild moorland have their own enchantment. But Rejane grows restless in this desolate land; doubtless in love with the Parson, she discourages any intimacy. Until that is, she persuades him to take her to a sinister castle situated on a treacherous headland. This is less a tale of unrequited love than exploration of divided selves, momentarily locked in an unequal embrace. Passion is revealed as a play of the senses as well as a destructive force. There have been valid comparisons to Poe, Kafka, and Thomas Hardy, but the presence of her trademark themes, cleverly juxtaposed and set in her risk-taking prose, mark The Parson as 100% Kavan.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, British Literature, Classics

166 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

About the author

Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.

Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.

Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anna Kavan does Gothic with a novella that feels like it could belong in a short story collection by Daphne du Maurier. The Parson wasn’t published until after Kavan’s death, but is estimated to have been written at some point between the late 1950s and early 60s, which places it after Sleep Has His House but before the success of Ice. It’s about the relationship between a young lieutenant, nicknamed ‘the Parson’ for his pious bearing, and Rejane, an initially charming woman whose beauty and refinement conceals her scheming nature. The plot hinges on their visit to a ruined castle, where Rejane’s true nature becomes clear. These scenes are deliciously melodramatic and full of portent: ‘an aura of sadism and terror clung to the walls’... Much has been made of how The Parson prefigures Ice; I’ll be honest, I didn’t really get that from it, but I liked it a lot. I particularly enjoyed the cryptic setting, a ‘small northern country’ with scenic extremes right out of a fairytale (plus a hotel with the glorious name of The Hope Deferred).

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[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rejane looked back at him with her unchanging, almost black eyes, in which no expression was legible, although she was watching him with a new interest. Strange how he suddenly seemed to have come alive, thrown off some repressive burden. This sudden emergence of intensity and imagination, in conjunction with his solid, manly good looks, was surprising and totally unforeseen. His face, animated now, had that touch of seriousness that had so captivated the army wives- she too found it attractive.

I had a vision of everything I couldn't care about falling into the sea. Soft voices, in another tongue, almost tender at the corners of the hello kitty mouth. If you could watch every home movie ever made about love. No doubt already decomposed and posed in foreign rituals of another time. I bit my tongue. I knew them in a past life, was it her life or only my prickled skin when I catch sight of the already dead pictures. Rejane gazed on her witch reflection in a melted puddle. He was horrified by the sight crushing his dream in tailored shoes. The sea never meant it either and it doesn't come to get her. She was Regina in A Scarcity of Love. In love with her body, coming to her own call. He was the doctor in the accent of another time and place. The cold fireside North. It must happen in nature and I could watch endless shows of Wild Kingdom. It's a mating call not picked up by dogs. The Parson, named for his propaganda film. She only wants the secret that goes off the cliff when the drive is too long. Love Regina, love Rejane. I'm afraid of my shadow when my gaze lasts too long when the distance is too far. The son inherits the ancient North, she is given the new city. When you are that rich you don't have to pay for anything. The soldier never conquers, only falls on the sword. I don't understand these positions. The kind of handsome that is no good to anyone because someone will always say "They are out of their league" about someone else. I've always wanted to have no time for leagues.
I have slept with this knife before. I thought that I wouldn't care if they fell into the ocean. I was a ghost living in their dashed castle and cold for a human to move in. They are the clothes they would leave behind. She is a fur coat. Dead tiny animals. He is a uniform that chicks dig. You destroyed my faith in love. Little girl smiles and little boys fishing in the cereal box for the secret toy surprise. A ghost could be trapped in his bottle in the sea into the past. I didn't care and I could not leave. Their fantasies, their fantastic horrors and evil older than celluloid leagues, cannot swim and they were held up on me in bubbles on the waves. I watched them sink and I watched them drown. I knew it would happen. Ghosts repeat themselves.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This posthumously published novel is estimated to have been written during the time period that also yielded the publication of Anna Kavan's far superior novels Eagles' Nest and Who Are You?, as well as some of her strongest short fiction. That it was found in manuscript form among her papers makes one wonder if she didn't deem it worthy of publication. Not that it's a bad book, by any means. But it feels half-formed next to her best work. The story is fairly straightforward: a soldier home on leave in his stark northern homeland meets an intriguing woman whom he believes to be 'the one'. She, however, is merely toying with him and the novel basically details the subsequent unraveling of this relatively innocent young man's psyche. In the process, Kavan spends most of her energy and words in building psychological profiles of both characters.

Many of Kavan's trademark themes and stylistic flourishes are on display here, though just not working together to their full potential: the weather and its parallels to human emotional state; the violence and horrid beauty of frigid, isolated natural places; control and resistance to control as manifested in human relationships; emotional manipulation; the boundless disconnect that can grow between people ('like figures under glass domes who could never possibly come together') both caused by and continuously generating an oblivious slighting of each other. No other writer I have read describes human isolation, alienation, and inability to authentically connect the way Kavan does with such haunting and clinical exactitude.

People looked into his compartment and then hurried on, frightened off by some emanation of loneliness enclosing him like a capsule—the loneliness of one who has gone beyond time and reality—which made them nervous, without knowing why, so that they kept away.

The train started. Sitting quite still and passive, unthinking, Oswald let it carry him back to the small town where he had left the car, got out here, and went into the streets.

It was lunch-time, there were few people about. Those he saw were like dream people, utterly disconnected from him. Yet it was he who felt shadowy beside them — they were solid with life. He vaguely wondered if they could see him, feeling like he passed like a shadow, outside their world, and alone. Where was he? What had happened to him? He'd never been like this before. But he was getting used to it and didn't mind. He thought no more about his feelings, or about anything. His consciousness seemed to have left him and gone on somewhere else.

It's here in the final chapter where I felt that Kavan excelled the most and came closest to some of her best work. Yet it ultimately wasn't near enough to place this one among my favorites of hers.

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whether authors’ works should be published after their deaths, perhaps even contrary to the authors' former desires, is an interesting question. I don't have a firm position on said question, as it seems case-specific. I’m glad Kafka’s works weren't destroyed, while Go Set a Watchman undermines the legacy of Harper Lee. Unlike the latter, we don’t have to worry that The Parson was published to cash in on a famous name. Still, the author herself didn’t think this book was worth publishing, and I don’t think there’s anyone more qualified than her to make that call.

I get why Kavan may not have wanted The Parson to be published. It’s not bad by any means, but it does feel amateurish compared to Ice (Kavan's masterpiece). The tale has some of the trappings of a haunted house story, with the main characters visiting what the blurb on the back of the book calls “a sinister castle situated on a treacherous headland,” and Kavan plays this angle up with no subtlety through her language choices: people haunt hotels, the setting of the moors is “icy, demonic, alien,” faces are witchlike, it’s all too on the nose, which makes it feel cheaply done compared to Ice.

But, like I said, it isn’t bad. Even in this lightly edited book Kavan shows that she can write:

Surely he deserved something, after the years of exile? Something of the dream that had touched him when the soldiers sang in the brief moment before the night, and the smoke rose in straight lines, diaphanous, pungent, into the cloudless sky?

The characters are respectable pieces of writing as well. Kavan explicitly lays out the characterization of Oswald the old-fashioned, chivalrous army officer without an ounce of introspection, and Rejane, a rich and beautiful woman who sees herself as a royal enchantress, but it’s effective despite this—you can tell instead of show, so long as you tell interestingly—and excusable in such a short work (it’s not even a hundred pages long, even if all the editions here list 166). That being said, the characterizations aren’t entirely consistent, for instance Kavan describes Oswald as warm-hearted at one point when the preceding pages beg to differ. They’re mostly nits, though, and ones I bet Kavan would have done away with if she had desired to polish this work.

The story itself has a few interesting points, like how it seems as though Oswald might actually have been the perfect match for Rejane, a knight to her princess, if she was really looking for such a thing. That being said, it's made clear from the beginning that, while Oswald sees Rejane as his life's great romance, Rejane sees Oswald as merely a way to amuse herself and kill some time, and the novel plays out predictably from that point. Though a haunted house story is teased, it isn't delivered (I feel like in literary fiction this happens more often than stories actually giving me a haunted house), and so the closest we get to the supernatural is Oswald being seen by Rejane as ghostlike at the end of the work, and Oswald seeing himself as a zombie.

Despite some solid writing and a couple well-drawn characters, The Parson doesn’t stand out particularly except as a prelude to Kavan’s later works, when she pioneered what we now know as weird fiction. The description of winter at novel’s end presage Kavan’s masterful setting descriptions in Ice, and the ending jumps into a surreal style much different from the rest of the book, but much more interesting and much closer to the inventiveness her later work would capture, which I enjoyed. Though it's far from clear, I interpret the ending as Oswald watching the lights from Rejane's cruise ship (the "stars" he watches from shore) and, in a sudden impulse motivated by despair and his inability to reconcile his actions with his self-image, his diving into the water in an attempt to reach those lights, almost certainly to his doom. It's this hint of future works, more than anything else, that makes The Parson worth reading, but I expect you'd be better off reading one of those later works directly instead. I'd skip this one unless you're a huge Kavan fan or reading it for academic purposes.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 3 out of 5]

"In the morning, instead of coming fully awake as usual, in bugle, he woke reluctantly, climbing laboriously and against his will out of the dark gulf where he had lain without moving the whole night long. If only he need not wake but could remain there, ignorant and innocent, as he'd been in his sleep! But it was no use wishing, already he was back again in his life. Before he'd even opened his eyes, he felt the events of yesterday lying in wait for him. He remembered, and pressed his eyelids together to shut out the light, unwilling to face the shame of existing." (85)

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

For post-40s Anna Kavan, this is realism. Coming from an author recessed so deeply by the time this was composed into anhedonia and her own very strange inner landscapes, this concise story of strangers spending a month of holiday in some sort of northern waste of moors and tors is actually somewhat refreshing. Of course, her descriptions, particularly of setting, still have a characteristic sort of pervasive phantasmagoric unreality, of heightened psychological intensity, lavishly conveyed. In fact, this story leads me to consider how Kavan's landscapes almost always seem a reflection of the hidden mental states of her characters. (Certainly this is unmistakable in other work as well, but typically only in the context of dream and delusion, not in what is ostensibly reality). Or perhaps reality is actually a little shaky here as well. There's a certain sense of subjective warping here that I also get from reading Shirley Jackson, a certain pervasive menace as internal as external.

At the time of its 1995 first printing, this was the "last unpublished novel" from Anna Kavan, yet they've somehow managed to scrape together at least two more since then. Kavan seems to have left a lot of material behind. Which is lucky, because it all seems pretty worthwhile. This certianly isn't her best work -- in particular, she actually seems to over psychoanalyze her leads (too many over-explicit observations "a sensation of Z for reasons X and Y not even known to herself") and extends this to certain heavy-handed adjective choices in her landscape descriptions -- but as I said it offers good contrast and insight to her other work of the period. And is enjoyable enough on its own, particularly the first 2/3s before an overly predictable finale that came as something of a letdown.

Suddenly a soldier's automatic awareness of weather conditions made him look out the window. A peculiar blanching and blurring process was obscuring the light outside. The sun was paling, a curious dimming was everywhere apparent, a pallor was diffusing itself into the air, smudging the shapes and stealing the colours of the garden flowers. Eclipsed to a pale lamp, the sun suddenly went out altogether; the cliff withdrew from sight. Only a few of the flowers in the foreground still floated, dim and derealized, colourless ghosts of themselves,in the thick white mists billowing up from the invisible water, which could be heard softly sucking and smacking the rocks below. (p.20)

So she was disconcerted to see, straight above them, the hoary grey head of rock, thrust into and filling the sky. Taking her by surprise, the bare upheaval of naked granite, grim and overwhelming in its immensity and nearness, had a strong effect on her imagination. She'd never been close to one of the tors; and, to her surprised eyes, there was something extraordinary about the huge knot of pale, up-ended stones, towering aggressively just overhead, like a fortress, excluding the sun. (p.31)

Suddenly, as she looked, the valley sank out of sight, all its toylike brightness put out as the sun disappeared and the lumpish tors heaved themselves up all around it in startling significance, huge and uncanny, the gloomy dark masses of moorland standing out menacingly. (p.47)

[Quin · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is how I imagine Daphne du Maurier would write if she smoked sherm

[Piim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written but the atmosphere is exceedingly dreadful

[Leonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novella about an officer called Oswald and nicknamed The Parson. Outwardly he is a fine healthy upstanding young man, but he is really rather odd, highly-string and ascetic. He falls in love with Rejane, a beautiful narcissistic socialite. Well, really, like Rejane, he is not so much in love as he is engaging with and indulging a phantom of his own psychological needs. Rejane is intrigued by Oswald in his guise as a voicing of the barbaric, otherworldly North, the landscape of moors and tors. She is in the habit of adopting various roles she finds herself piquant in, and Oswald offers her a brief fling at being Cathy, though he keeps spoiling it by not being Heathcliff enough.

On the last day of Rejane’s sojourn in Oswald’s part of the world, they have a strange trip to a ruined castle. Oswald sees Rejane for the witchy soulless creature that she is. Rejane is almost possessed by the role of cruel queen before nearly falling through the castle into the sea. Oswald rescues her and, furious with her for despoiling his vision of the perfect woman as an escape from worldliness, he rapes her, though she does not really realise that that is how he means it. He is traumatised by the knowledge that that is the kind of person he is, and the book ends portentously, which these kinds of stories generally do, and which I’ve come to think is their flaw. It exceptionalises the characters, makes them too much the people who do what no one ever does except when they do, rather than explaining the strange things that go on inside people as ordinary as anyone.

This was shelved in the Romance section. The gender dynamics are redolent of Romance, I suppose, but it’s just about told from an angle. There’s not much that’s new here, I suppose, but it felt new. Kavan has a kind of distant but intimately knowing approach to her characters’ peculiarities and I quite enjoyed the barbaric North theme, which is something Kavan as well as Rejane is playing with.

[bj P · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish so much that this book could last much longer.

[Ruby · Rating 3 out of 5]

kavan is a a writer of atmosphere, but she cannot quite capture the moors for me. the episode in the castle at sea, however, is fantastic.

[Gareth Schweitzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intense fifties melodrama/ romance.

Incredible detail and shifts in character’s feelings, motivations and psychological states.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

This dusted off lost manuscript isn't on the level of ICE or other work from this period. For Kavan die-hards only.

[Gillian Wheeldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written and short.

[Dana Jerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how I feel about the ending here. But considering how the manuscript itself falls along AK’s personal trajectory, it lands somehow abruptly and aptly. 💙🖤

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was published in the mid-90s, from a manuscript believed to date to the mid/late 50s. Since then "Guilty" has been published so I presume it is no longer true that it was the last of her posthumous works.

There are a few scenes in which imagery similar to "Ice" and other later books turns up, but this tonally different to the later fantasy excursions. In this book, the material world is quite stable and acts as the pitiless backdrop against which the characters grasp the essential illusory basis of their lives. Kavan narrates from a God's Eye position in which nothing is hidden, and psychology is excavated and exposed at every moment. There is little dialogue, except at hinge points of personal revelation and self-revelation.

The protagonists are a wealthy socialite on a holiday in the "Northern land", and a local Army officer on leave, the latter having a highly reserved, slightly priggish manner that has earned him the eponymous nickname. Both are contained and defined in their social roles and self-myths. The tourist Rejane is a narcissist hiding behind a "pleasing unaffected facade", whilst Oswald is genteel-poor, desperately keeping up the family military tradition as the favoured son, whose "masculine privilege" has earned him a better chance in life than his youngest sister. They fall in to mutual infatuation, but in the end they are just 2 empty creatures scuttling around the craggy landscape of old ruins and a hotel called The Hope Deferred. There consciousness is only consciousness of a dream-life, and when they become lucid they merely realise their insubstantial nature. Not as fictional creatures, but as human creatures, as Kavan saw them.

As with a lot of her later writing there is a lot of flat statements about reality, realness, unreality, uncanniness, but this time it doesn't lapse ineffectively into referencing of "nameless dread". This is how these characters would describe their own state, in the bland unevocative terms available to them, because they are at the limit of their self-awareness. The narration is never frantic, it coolly follows the breakdown and reformation of these flimsy souls.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Parson is an underrated work, even more so than Anna Kavan’s work in general. It was published posthumously, and it is unclear when it was written, though it seems likely that it was written prior to Ice and then shelved during the author's lifetime. Like all her writing, it’s a tricky one to appreciate. I would hesitate to recommend this novella, though it is undoubtedly an exceptional work of art, ghostly unique in Kavan’s trademark style of dark, stifling dream narrative. Against the backdrop of a powerful northern landscape of cliffs, castles, and moors, amid violent shifts of weather and the cold, restless sea, a soldier-on-leave (nicknamed, in his regiment, The Parson) and a beautiful, rich woman begin an unlikely courtship, which Kavan charts from each of their vastly different perspectives. Featuring another exaggerated incarnation of Kavan’s evil mother personality type (a character similar, though not quite as awful, as appears in A Scarcity of Love) and piling scenes that weigh on the reader’s equilibrium, it’s just a tough one to be certain someone will enjoy. I did enjoy it, greatly, so maybe I should shut up and tell you to go buy a copy -- the Peter Owen reprint is still readily available.

[Jennie Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I will switch this to 4 stars, or hell even 5! It's so similar to Who Are You? which I finished a few months ago & perhaps that's why it didn't strike me quite so hard as her writing usually does. I did feel the cruel passiveness of Rejane in my bones though. There's a gender role reversal in the Parson: the woman is the unfeeling narcissistic predator & the man is the victim led on by his naiveté.

What Kavan does best for me is this: emotional disconnect & the unwillingness to see beyond one's own self into another. The result of this self obsessed disconnect is usually death.

Her writing gives me anxiety, like I need to take a hot bath after reading her to calm down. What a fatalist she was.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kavan sets this brief tragedy in a barren, nightmarish landscape of moors and the angry ocean. (Similar to Ice and, I'm guessing, her other works.) A blond, Northern officer falls in love with a cold, gorgeous, dark-haired narcissist from warmer climes to the South. The story is short but could be shorter, as reiterations and hand-wringing spin their wheels in the middle section. Fairly predicable, and sad, but the descriptions are unique and bleakly original.

[Matt Warren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this was one of Kavan's lost/unpublished works and it certainly does have that "unfinished" feel that a lot of desultory Kafka has. And not in a way where the uncanny gauziness of Kavan's book world seems entirely intentional, as it very much does in Ice. Still, it has vibes for days and is an interesting, almost thought-experiment-ish portrait of gender/power dynamics between two weird archetypical non-people constructs. A quick, weird read for experimental literature dorks.