The Murderer by Roy A. K. Heath

First published: 1978

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Sometime between the 1950’s and the early 1970’s

Locale: Guyana

Principal Characters:

• Galton Flood, the protagonist, a young drifter
• Gemma, his wife
• Selwyn, his brother, a druggist
• Nekka, Selwyn’s wife
• Winston, Galton’s boyhood friend, a butcher
• A. H. Burrowes, Galton’s father-in-law
• Therphilio Giles, Gemma’s former lover, the father of her child
• Harris, Galton’s neighbor, a police informer
• A Watchman, Galton’s friend

The Novel

The plot of The Murderer revolves around the difficulty the main character, Galton Flood, has in relating to women. His mother left him with a bad impression of females; she overwhelmed his father, whom he admired, and kept Galton away from girls his own age. As a Christian Puritan, she disapproved of worldly pleasures and freedom. Galton wishes he were like his brother Selwyn, who always did as he pleased while they were growing up, who took a healthy interest in sex, and who ended up happily married and a successful druggist. Yet Galton has absorbed his mother’s prudishness and cannot but see women as forbidden sexual objects and hate them for resembling his mother.

When his mother dies a year after his father, Galton makes the first of several bids for freedom. He moves from Georgetown (his hometown) to Linden (a river town) to live on a small inheritance. He takes a room in the house of A. H. Burrowes, a shopkeeper, where he meets Burrowes’ lonely daughter Gemma, who whiles away her time reading novels. Galton and Gemma take an intense interest in each other, but when Galton finds out from the Walk-Man (the town eccentric, who judges people’s characters by the way they walk) that Burrowes takes in male boarders in order to marry off his daughter, Galton is shocked and angry, and he leaves town.

Galton goes to work in the jungle, mining a river for diamonds. His work companions are all male, and he treasures the time he spends with them. After two years, however, he craves women. He returns to his hometown and boards in the family house which he owns with his brother Selwyn, who lives there with his wife and son. He responds to an old letter from Gemma Burrowes, which he had not received until he returned home, thus reviving their relationship. While Galton maintains a certain aloofness in their correspondence, Gemma is both flirtatious and hostile. Galton is attracted and irritated by her. To add to his confusion, Nekka, Selwyn’s wife, dislikes him and does not want him to stay in the house.

Galton’s inability to understand or interact with women impels him to leave, and his simultaneous need for a woman impels him to marry Gemma. They live in the house of Galton’s friend Winston, but Galton is too restless to stay. He and Gemma end up living in a tenement. His wife puts up with his prudish lovemaking, his friendship with the unctuous police informer who lives downstairs, and his moody reserve. His job in a radio shop is better than the one he had as watchman in a lumber yard, and he is taking a course to learn more about radios. His marriage, however, grows increasingly sour. He becomes suspicious of his wife, having learned from her that she was not a virgin (as he was) when they married. When she tells him that she had a lover in her father’s house during the time he was away in the jungle, his jealousy and suspicion turn into hatred and he murders her.

This is the secret that preys on him for the rest of the novel. The only friend he has at this point (he has stayed clear of Winston since leaving his house) is a watchman from the lumberyard. He spends much time with him and his male cronies, and finally, he confesses his crime to him. It does him little good. He feels more and more as though he were corked in a bottle, barred from happiness and isolated from those around him. Selwyn has made an apartment for him under their house, but Galton keeps to himself. He has an affair with Nekka’s cousin Mildred (who, because she is empty-headed and predictable, attracts him), but her father finds out and ends it.

Finally, Galton is confronted by Gemma’s father and her lover, Therphilio Giles. Burrowes reveals that Gemma had a child by Giles. After confessing the murder to Giles in private, Galton relapses into his semicatatonic state. Giles brings him a bottle of expensive rum and tells him that he exalts in Galton’s spiritual illness. Galton is left to live with his conscience and his madness, and he becomes a town eccentric, supported by his brother and shunned by the townspeople. His earlier dream of being a fool on public display has come true, and though he is offered a symbol of friendship at the end (Giles’s bottle of rum), he is unable to drink it or toast the dead with it as his father did when Galton was a child.

The Characters

Galton Flood is a proud and sensitive man brought up by a tyrannical and prudish mother. He allows himself to become a pariah in his own community, especially in the circle of his family and friends. He desires women and is capable of love, but because of his mother, he also hates women and is afraid to be emotionally open to them. In effect, his psyche is paralyzed to the point that he can enjoy neither his freedom nor his male companions. His repression results in murder, and the murder results in his further paralysis.

The women in the story embody all that Galton needs from and despises in the female. He needs his mother’s love, but she emasculates him. He needs Gemma’s love, but she is willful and more experienced than he. Nekka lives in the glow of his admired brother Selwyn’s love, but she is stingy and spiteful to Galton. Mildred is the only woman with whom Galton feels comfortable, but only because she allows him to forget who he really is—a seriously damaged soul in need of a profound cure.

All the male characters in the story possess something that Galton wants. In the beginning, Selwyn has freedom and sexual ease, and later, success as a husband, father, and professional man. Galton’s friend Winston has love for a woman and a carefree attitude toward adversity. Burrowes has control over Gemma as a father unburdened by a wife. The Walk-Man, Giles’s brother, has a reputation and the respect of other men. Giles himself has the trophy of Gemma’s virginity and her child. The watchman has wisdom and the affection of his male peers. Even Harris, Galton’s neighbor, attracts Galton, for he has a mother who depends on him and who, as a whore, makes a virtue out of his own seedy profession. For Galton, Harris represents the success of the lust and selfishness in himself which confuse him.

Critical Context

Roy A. K. Heath’s fiction focuses on the social climate and development of Guyana in the modern world. Georgetown, Guyana’s capital and Heath’s birthplace, is often the setting for his novels. To most of his English-speaking readers, this setting is exotic, but Heath spends less time describing it than concentrating on the exotic behavior and grim psychological aspects of his main characters and on their social milieu. This milieu, despite the rituals by which its members support and console one another, oppresses characters such as Galton Flood, who displays a Dostoevskian tendency toward self-absorption and violence.

Heath is a prolific writer; his style is uneven but interesting, ranging from the poetic to the colloquial. In The Murderer, as in much of his work, several levels of style coexist uneasily, mirroring the tensions and contradictions of urban Guyana.

Bibliography

Guardian Weekly. Review. CXX (January 1, 1979), p. 15.

King, Francis. Review in The Spectator. CCXL (April 8, 1978), p. 24.

Pike, Francis. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. May 19, 1978, p. 564.

Times Educational Supplement. Review. February 26, 1982.