Richard Hughes was something of an enigma. His first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, was published to acclaim in 1929 and a glittering writing career seemed to beckon – but wasn’t to be. A kind of spin-off, In Hazard, followed in 1938, and then only two other novels: The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973). The latter two, part of an ambitious, unfinished trilogy entitled The Human Predicament, are very different from the earlier two; they’re an attempt to sketch interwar European history, while Jamaica and In Hazard are seafaring adventures.
My abiding memory of reading The Fox is receiving two shocks. The first occurs near the beginning. Two men are in a damp Welsh landscape, returning from shooting birds in the coastal marshes. One is carrying something over his shoulder – not the expected brace of duck or other waterfowl but the body of a little dead girl. The second occurs later in the story when one suddenly realises that the figure hiding in an attic is Adolf Hitler – that realisation comes like a sudden blow to the solar plexus.
It’s perhaps fitting that a book that’s meant to be the first of a trilogy should itself have a tripartite structure. Part one is set on the protagonist Augustine’s Welsh estate, part two in Bavaria where his German cousins, with whom he goes to stay, live, and part three is set partly in Germany and partly in Britain.
Historical events provide an important backdrop. It’s the early 1920s. Augustine just missed serving in the first World War and inherited the estate because his cousin was killed in action but the war has changed the position of his class irrevocably. It has also hastened the death of Liberal England. Meanwhile, Germany is enduring deep postwar inflation, fuelling the discontents and shock caused by defeat, and Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch figures largely in the novel’s action.
All in all, the parts are uneven; there is arguably too much philosophising and some knowledge of German history of the period would make understanding easier. Despite these, tackling the book is well worthwhile – if only for the shocks it delivers.
