"The Camberwell Miracle" by J D Beresford

Beresford wrote over thirty novels in the early to mid twentieth century but is perhaps better known to day as the father of Elizabeth Beresford who wrote the Wombles stories.

My copy of the book was pre-owned by T J Fletcher; I believe this to be Trevor Fletcher (1922 - 2018) who was at one time the lead HMI for Mathematics in the UK; he knew my mother in their youth.

The book was published as a Penguin paperback in the second month of World War 2: This is its eightieth anniversary.

Which family connection means that I wish I could be more appreciative of the book.

A doctor, educated at the "grammar school" in Bedford, practising in Camberwell, discovers the gift of faith healing. When the newspapers discover him he has to disappear because there are too many people seeking to consult him. A young girl who was crippled by polio when she was two seeks him out; whether or not she marries her ugly psychoanalyst boyfriend depends on her being cured.

Thus this is science fiction of a sort. Faith healing is explained by analogy to histolysis, the process by which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and by appealing to the common (but I think incorrect) belief that quantum physics has revealed that the laws of cause and effect no loner hold; Max Planck is quoted to support this. Psychoanalysis is added to show that the spirit or the soul can, if the subject's multiple selves are aligned in the correct direction, make alterations to cells and even genetic information in order to repair diseased organs.

It isn't that I am sceptical of the ideas, it is that they are explained at length with long paragraphs of argument. The characters are stereotypical and one-dimensional: the miracle worker is gentle and kind and good and unselfish, the newspaper editor is obsessed with his organ's circulation, the surgeon is a baddy, the sweet innocent girl at the heart of it all is a sweet innocent girl. And the working class characters touch their forelocks but sometimes let the upper-classes down because they gossip or because of other weaknesses of character. The only interesting character is her boyfriend the psychoanalyst who fell in love with her when she was ten and is worried that if she is healed she will not look at an ugly person like himself but these conflicts are never properly developed. I didn't believe in any of them and there endless theoretical posturings bored me. I skim-read most of it.

Some good moments:

• "He was not the sort of man to find fault with himself unnecessarily." (C 1)
• "He believed in miracles, but only as evidence of the direct interference of God, who could at His own will upset any of those provisional laws of cause and effect that He had in the first placed imposed upon the world He had created." (C 4) This put me in mind of a line in The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor: "How could he say that there was only God's insistence, even though He abided by no rules Himself, that His strictures should be discovered and obeyed?"
• "If we're not meant to do this or that, particularly not meant to use our intelligence, we might just as well be puppets." (C 6)
• "He was one of those rubicand (sic), full-bidoed, almost offensively healthy-looking men, who do not look their age at sixty and die suddenly a few years later of heart-failure or excessive blood pressure." (C 8)
• "He could hear the lecherous wailing of a saxophone, the monotonous thudding of drum and double-bass ... 'Jazz ought to be made an offence against the peace ... There's something lewd and obscene about it'." (C 9)
• "People of that sort  were always glad of the chance to get something out of you if they could" (C 14) Sometimes the author's inherent snobbery shows.
• "Unfortunately that first love never lasted. It was largely physical, and you soon got tired." (C 14)

The plot has a typical four-part structure with the actual Camberwell Miracle, a significant turning-point, being at the 29% mark, Dick's declaration of love being at 53% and the beginning of the two trials, the commencement of the endgame, at 85%. In other words, each section is a little later than the 25%, 50% and 75% marks; perhaps this indicates that the start of the novel is too slow.

October 2019; 278 pages