In 2014 Mal Peet, best known as a children’s author, published his first novel for adult readers: The Murdstone Trilogy, a wickedly funny satire of literary life in which an impoverished writer makes a Mephistophelean pact to succeed in the publishing business by writing a high-end fantasy series. It was a delightful mix of caustic wit, high comedy and flashes of real darkness that defied genre conventions, even as it satirised our near-infantile attachment to predictable forms of writing. “I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author’s intent,” he once said. “My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.”
Sadly, Peet died in early 2015, but now we have the posthumous Mr Godley’s Phantom, a short but powerful novel that, in its underlying engagement with ideas of justice and history, as well as its eerie, unsettling characterisation and brilliant evocations of place, pushes Peet’s standing significantly beyond anything his previous work might have suggested. In fact, it is something close to a masterpiece – a glorious one-off, beautifully told, with a narrative that is daringly simple right up until the point when it becomes very complicated indeed.
A man named Martin Heath returns home from the second world war, having witnessed a succession of terrible events, culminating in the liberation of Belsen. Unable to settle, constantly haunted by what he has seen – he cannot even go for a walk without turning the excursion into a military operation – he appears doomed to an empty, directionless existence, until he is invited to the remote Dartmoor home of Mr Godley, the owner of a Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville. Mr Godley has a proposition for Martin, in whom he sees echoes of his own lost son: will he come and stay in this house in the back of beyond as his mechanic, handyman and occasional chauffeur? With nothing else to distract him, Martin agrees – but then, Mr Godley has another proposition.
It would be wrong to go into detail about the plot, even though this novel depends more for its suspense on existential and philosophical pressures than on purely narrative tensions. However, it is a joy to watch Peet raise one set of expectations then leave them hanging so that another set can materialise, the book constantly sliding between one genre and another until something unforeseen emerges. There is an unconventional but altogether persuasive love story at the heart of the narrative, as well as a detective novel in embryo, offering all the fun of Agatha Christie-style problem solving with none of the po‑faced righteousness of conventional morality. In some ways, Martin’s story is reminiscent of Tom Birkin’s slow emergence from the darkest pit of post-traumatic stress disorder in JL Carr’s A Month in the Country. Like Birkin, he has been randomly inducted into a secret society whose members, having come through an inferno that others cannot even begin to imagine, are not only obliged to live by a new vision of the world – both natural and human – but also by a new and more fluid morality.
And the similarities do not end there. Like Carr’s still underappreciated masterpiece, Mr Godley’s Phantom is one of those books that, while seeming to offer a fairly conventional scenario at the outset, slyly moves on to show the myriad ways in which what we record as history – an endlessly shifting combination of the observed and the presumed, the mythical and the superstitious – intersects with the dailiness of lived experience. The characters who manage the “real world” (the policemen and lawyers, all the official keepers of the factual and the banal) may be intelligent enough to follow a conventional crime case to its logical conclusion, and morally engaged enough to want to see justice done, but in the realm of Mr Godley they are out of their depth. This is a profound, elegant novel that achieves greatness by creating its own, self-regulating world in which ordinary logic does not apply – a dreamworld, if you like, but no less real for that.
• Mr Godley’s Phantom by Mal Peet (David Fickling, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.43, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
