The Dragon in Shallow Waters by V. Sackville-West (1921)

This is Sackville-West's second novel, and a livelier proposition than her first. The quality that they both share is the ineffable sense one gets of a fine mind at work, even though the results are mixed. Her first suffered from a slight stiffness which is here too, but in a smaller amount - it feels, at least for the first two-thirds, like a very intense Hardy. I wonder if he read it. Set in a fenland village near Spalding with a soap factory at its centre, and also an abbey (I think it can only be modelled on Crowland), it is a rich study of the psychology of bitterness in the form of Silas Dene, a blind man and curdled with it. He has equal parts of violent perversity and bullying hauteur. His brazenly domineering nature is weirdly contrasted with a fatal fearfulness and changeability. He is a murderer and a weakling. The tendency toward superintensity, really very evenly handled initially, finally overheats at the two-thirds point, with the plot twisting on a belatedly remembered reaction of Dene's to a relatively inconsequential event. The results are too much, with explosively poetic exchanges and agonized soul-searching at too high a pitch. But throughout it all there is still that element that calls for forgiveness of these excesses - the awareness that the writer is giving it everything she's got - one also can't help admiring her for it. And there is a sense of survival after the turmoil - the ending is satisfyingly filmic, broad and fatalistic.