Mistress of Her Domain

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

"I was 12 years old the first time Master Georgie ordered me to stand stock still and not blink...Mr. Hardy didn't have to be told to keep still because he was dead." And with no further ado, British author Beryl Bainbridge presents the first morbid snapshot in her 16th novel, Master Georgie (Carroll & Graf; 190 pages; $21), a deadpan tale of secrets and lies set in Liverpool and the Crimea in the 1840s and '50s. The story is told in alternating chapters by three characters: Myrtle, an orphan, in love with George, a doctor and amateur photographer; Pompey Jones, George's ambitious photo assistant and sometime lover; and Dr. Potter, an eccentric geologist. Each in the grip of a private obsession, the three follow George to the Crimean War--the first conflict to be covered by photographers--and all three witness scenes of horror that no camera could ever capture.

Following The Birthday Boys, a story about Robert Falcon Scott's deadly trek to the South Pole, and Every Man for Himself, about the sinking of the Titanic, Master Georgie completes an ambitious trilogy of novels that dissect great examples of human folly. But to say that Bainbridge--who is perhaps one of the best living novelists Americans don't know much about, and whose work, including this latest novel, has been shortlisted five times for the prestigious Booker Prize--writes historical fiction is like saying that Jane Austen wrote domestic comedies. These three novels, each around a mere 200 pages, are epics under a microscope, reducing the sweep of history to the random collisions of its human players.

After The Birthday Boys, no reader will ever experience the cold in the same way, while Bainbridge's Titanic novel says more about hubris and class distinctions than any gazillion-dollar epic by James Cameron ever could. And Master Georgie reminds one, again, that war correspondents do not always get it right. As Bainbridge's group slogs across the Crimean peninsula, men and animals dropping from cholera and in battle all around them, the scene becomes surreal. At one point a soldier shows up with his ear blown off. "He kept shaking our hands in turn and saying how happy he was to meet us...the blood flying in all directions as he pumped," Pompey Jones recalls. "Then he dropped dead."

Bainbridge's spare style ensures that her work is entirely free of sentimentality or melodrama. What she doesn't say becomes almost more important than what she does; readers are left to decipher the twisted relationships of the characters--the fact that Myrtle willingly bears George's children because his highborn wife cannot, for instance--as best they can. There may be love in this novel, but there is little that is sweet.

Except the prose. "I rode towards Inkerman with my chin buried in my shirt, smelling myself for warmth," Dr. Potter recalls as the novel marches toward its final, appalling snapshot. "Midst the dirt and the staleness I detected the frail scent of cornflowers." Like the unblinking young Myrtle, forced to pose for a picture with a dead man, Bainbridge faces the most shadowy aspects of human nature head on, and demands that her readers do the same.

--By Elizabeth Gleick