Word: dougal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Maggie McRacken was once the wife of a quiet. Red Springs, N.C., farm boy ("He was so good and I was so lucky to have him that it scared me") who, at 27, and just 3½ years after their marriage, became Private James Dougal McRacken, a soldier in the U.S. Army's tough Normandy-landing goth Division. On the night of Aug. 5, 1944, McRacken and eleven other G.I.s crouched behind a tank as the 90th approached Mayenne on its drive toward Paris. Retreating German troops had blown up two of three bridges across the Mayenne River...
...When Dougal comes among these people, as director of "human research" in Mr. Druce's textile firm, the tangled fabrics of their lives come suddenly and bewilderingly apart. Dixie Morse, who is working nights at a cinema in order to save money for a model bungalow, refuses to sleep any longer with Humphrey Place, and he, in turn, leaves her at the altar. Mr. Weedin, the personnel manager, looks into Dougal's bewitched eyes and at "the alarming bones of his hands" and suffers a nervous breakdown. Mr. Druce himself, suspecting that Dougal is a police informer...
...really the Devil who is speaking so caddishly through Humphrey. The Devil in this incarnation is known as Dougal Douglas, or occasionally as Douglas Dougal, and he comes equipped with a crooked right shoulder, a clawlike right hand, and two small bumps on his head where a plastic surgeon has removed the horns. When he looks at people, he is "like a succubus whose mouth is its eyes." In the short span of this hilarious novel, Douglas the Devil coaxes into mortal sin not only Humphrey Place but most of the first citizens in the South London district of Peckham...
...Neither Dougal's victims nor the reader ever discovers precisely what is deviling them. It is Novelist Spark's triumph that it never seems to matter. When Dougal is accused of being "unnatural," he replies: "All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural." On every page of Peckham Rye, the author demonstrates that notion with high comic brilliance and a strabismic...