Feminist’s vengeance

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 27

Feminist’s vengeance

The Darkest Hour. By Lourna Ford. Constable, 1988. 230 pp. $24.95. (Reviewed by Ken Strongman) In these days of feminism, from frenzied to friendly, it is not surprising that “The Darkest Hour” was written, but it is a pity. It has a simple plot. Carla Bensen, 40, has written one successful book and moves to a lonely cottage on the outskirts of a fishing village on the east coast of America to write another. She was sexually abused by her father and her husband, and has raised her daughter, now an adult Jiving in Israel, alone. She led a humdrum office life in New York before writing her book and is using her new-found freedom to be independent. She forms a relationship with a young drifter, is raped, sodomised, and otherwise brutalised by three locals, and after a time takes the law into her own hands, exacting revenge in a horrifying eye-fof-an-eye sort of way. In the end, perfidy strikes again. Although reasonably well written, “The Darkest Hour” is not simply a traditional tale of vengeance, with the

usual sprinkling of the sex and violence which turn the wheels of modern fiction. Simultaneously, it is a polemic for fervid feminism, concerned with the abuse of women by crudely powerful men, and a nasty, gratuitously vicious description of one way in which they can be overcome. While not wishing to deny that some men have a case to answer, a novel, particularly a crime novel, has to be very well done to be successful in being used as a vehicle to carry such - a message. Otherwise, it sounds ; didactic, even hectoring in tone. Such it is with “The Darkest Hour.” The book not only proselytizes the feminist cause, although, not quite directly, but does so in an . unacceptably distasteful , manner. It ‘ almost makes one want to dismiss it as merely another sex and violence potboiler. This, though, would be unfair; it is both more and less than a 1 potboiler. Of course, it is being reviewed by a male; mind you, it was written by a South African still living in South Africa, which may or may not . be relevant to anything at all.