The easiest way of introducing Stannard, the unreliable narrator of Jem Poster's neo-Victorian novel Courting Shadows, is by analogy. Take Mr. Lockwood from Wuthering Heights (including his simultaneous obsession with/fear of sexual desire), strip him of all his comic overtones, and make him the sole narrator. There you have Stannard, quite possibly the most oppressively unpleasant narrator I've encountered in some time. Whether or not Poster had Lockwood in mind is open to question, although his class snobbery, inability to "read" people, and protracted illness are all very Lockwoodian. When we first meet Stannard, an architect who is renovating a village's ancient, rotting church, he is in the process of causing an ugly accident that renders one worker permanently ill. This event sets the scene for what follows: Stannard unearths a coffin (and promptly busts it open), tries to conceal the evidence (and fails), destroys the suspiciously erotic imagery carved on a pew (much to the pastor's horror), and so on down the line. Later, in the grips of his illness, he destroys a suspiciously erotic medieval painting (the reader will note a trend). Worst of all, he simultaneously courts and repulses Ann Rosewell, a local village girl; their final moments together precipitate his mental collapse, and may or may not have far uglier consequences.
Like many neo-Victorian novels, Courting Shadows dwells on the oppressiveness of a monstrous masculinity, simultaneously given to bouts of erotic rage and to fearing the female body's allure. Although Stannard's behavior is clearly not sui generis, we see only hints of its origin in his domineering father, whom Stannard associates with "the stinging words, the slaps and cuffs, the irrepressible tears of a helpless and bewildered child" (200). What little we see and hear of the elder Stannard amounts to a stereotypical evil Victorian patriarch, who manipulates his son and subjugates his wife. Our Stannard is determinedly affectless as well as faithless. When Banks, the pastor, asks him to assist Jeffords--the man injured as a result of Stannard's haste--Stannard sourly observes, "I might quite reasonably have challenged his melodramatic analysis of Jefford's predicament or taken issue with the offensive suggestion that such assistance as I might be prepared to offer could be viewed as a form of expiation" (53). The language here is typical: Stannard resists any appeal to empathy or emotion as sheer excess, takes frequent refuge in slightly pedantic phrasing, insists on heightened notions of genteel propriety, and, above all, consistently refuses to acknowledge cause and effect when it comes to his own actions. At the same time, Stannard's cool, detached narrative voice is couched in retrospect, produced (as we eventually discover) at a moment of crushing psychological crisis. His unreliability derives less from his representation of events, except at the end, than from his attempt to "ice over" the evidence of his own emotional and sexual volatility. (In that sense, Stannard is very close to Robert Edric's Charles Weightman, the chilly narrator of another neo-Victorian novel, Gathering the Water.)
The novel links Stannard's demolition job on the church, which runs roughshod over tradition, architecture, and art, to his total lack of sympathy. When Stannard unearths the coffin, Banks warns him that "[t]he emotion is perhaps the essential fact, far more important than mere historical detail" (63), and Banks' affective attachment to the church and all it contains sharply contradicts Stannard's brutality. Stannard cannot and will not imagine himself into another's place, a very Victorian sign of villainy. Symptomatically, Stannard never appears to have an overall vision for the church; he focuses on isolated details of imminent collapse, rather than on the church as a sacred space or as a locus for community. For Stannard, the church neither contains nor embodies anything in particular. His lack of sympathy in the present, then, extends to his lack of sympathy for the past: he cannot appreciate the medieval remnants in the church, like the woman carved on the pew, as anything but "barbarous iconography" (72), signs of "the flesh" (73) best expunged from human consciousness. (Ironically, this is one of the few moments in which Stannard actually invokes "sympathy" [72], only to be informed that Banks can't understand what he's going on about.) Stannard's reaction to this carving, as well as to the sexual imagery in the doom painting, both sexualizes and feminizes the past itself, transforming history into an erotic, uncontrolled free-for-all that must be beaten down, tamed, and finally erased. Not coincidentally, Stannard's own past, save for momentary traces of paternal violence, is almost entirely absent from this narrative. Stannard seeks to eradicate the church's past much as he eradicates his own, "empowering" himself in the process; similarly, he violates the church's integrity much as he violates that of Ann Rosewell, the young (and perhaps sexually experienced) woman who arouses his desire. Not surprisingly, where Banks early on describes a youthful vision that awakened him to the futility of chasing after facts, Stannard's own "vision" at the end frees him from history altogether: "What if the structures we inherit are fundamentally flawed or debased beyond redemption? Why should we take upon ourselves the burden of restoring what was never good and can never be made so?--a decaying patchwork of stone, wood and plaster, a world of damage and disease" (261).
The blatantly self-serving nature of this vision, unlike those experienced by Banks and Jeffords, frees Stannard from thinking about his responsibility to Ann. When he first spots her, Stannard believes that Ann must be one of the local gentlewomen; nevertheless, when he actually speaks to her for the first time, "[h]er gaucheness, and indeed her sheer lack of breeding, astonished me" (46). Their encounters, which finally culminate in muddy outdoors sex, continue this push-and-pull of class-based disgust and heavily-romanticized desire. When Ann writes to him, he is struck by both her poor cursive and, less predictably, by the "propriety" (101) of her letter. He simultaneously yearns for and fears the signs of her eroticism (now, in a conventional move, linked to class as well as to the "barbarous" past). An evening assignation sparks, again, his fear of her body (at first, he reacts badly to being touched) and his lust, climaxing in a moment that, significantly, he finds himself unable to represent with any exactitude (117). This narrative breakdown, which occurs again when they have sex (156) and, once more, when he assaults her (267), casts sexuality as a kind of unnameable threat to the self. The problem with the erotic imagery in the church, then, is not that it arouses feelings that belong to the past (although Stannard insists that it does), but that those feelings reside in the present, within Stannard himself. Stannard's story registers the distortions involved when he tries to repress those sentiments--which nevertheless burst forth in physical and emotional violence.
Stannard's sexual monstrosity is Gothic in its strength, as well as its reach. Despite Stannard's various frustrations and even humiliations, no other character manages to stop him when he is bent on destruction. Banks, for example, is supposedly the novel's example of "healthy" masculinity, both deeply sympathetic to others and cheerfully open to the eroticism within his church, but he spends the entire novel being totally ineffective. The cultured Mr. Redbourne, who lives in a manor house redolent of Gothic decay, is also a frustrated, isolated gay man, whose charities to the local youths apparently do nothing to help them--and, we are led to believe, come with strings attached. (Stannard's utter lunkheadedness about Redbourne's sexuality is the closest the novel comes to humor.) The locals try to protect Ann Rosewell and each other from Stannard, but fail. For that matter, Ann Rosewell's mother may or may not be violently abusive in her own right. The novel's only glimpses of hope come in fragmentary visions--a woman moved by a fallen horse's plight (193-94), a momentary sighting of "the eloquent geometry of love" embodied in an apparently intimate family (277). But these sights do nothing to ameliorate Stannard's anti-social violence. Sympathy may be what holds this novel's society together, but it proves to be a frail defense.