The Quest for the Historical Susan Pevensie
Coming of Age in Wartime with Magda Szabó's "Abigail"
I’m trying, often without success, to avoid idle criticism in this forum (reviews need to be, for my own well-being, gigs that pay, however modestly), so this post will boil down to a recommendation. You can take my word for it here or read my reasoning, but anyway the bottom line is that more people, and maybe you specifically, should read the 1970 novel Abigail by Magda Szabó (translated to English in 2020 by Len Rix for the NYRB Classics imprint).
Set in Hungary, Abigail follows fifteen-year-old Gina Vitay, the only daughter of a widowed general in the Hungarian army, from the fall of 1943 through the German invasion in March of the following year. Her father, part of a covert resistance to Hungary’s involvement with the Axis, sends her from Budapest to a strict provincial Protestant boarding school in the hope of keeping her from being captured and used against him as a hostage in the event that he is discovered. Gina, at first innocent of this motive, is distressed and furious at what she sees as her exile. She immediately runs into conflict with both the other girls in her class and the staff at the Bishop Matula Academy. Gina is, at least in her own conceit, more worldly and mature than the other girls. She is a child of the elite—well-traveled, well-accoutred, fluent in idiomatic French thanks to an Alsatian governess—with a hauteur to match. These qualities don’t really soften even as she gradually learns more about her predicament and experiences both forgiveness and reckless protectiveness from many of the people in her small new world (the novel’s title refers to an eponymous statue, in whose urn the girls leave notes begging for help in desperate situations too embarrassing or trivial to bother God with).
In other words, it is something like a perfectly designed young-adult novel: dead parent, boarding school, strict rules practically demanding adolescent rebellion, being or having a dangerous secret, the Second World War, magic statue.1 I was a bit surprised at its narrative simplicity after reading The Fawn, a much more disturbing and complex novel that Szabó wrote years earlier, until I grasped that it was really for younger readers. The adult characters are cast with ruthless economy—Chekhov’s handguns, the lot of them—and one sees the reversals coming from miles away. If it had been labeled this way by NYRB Classics, I doubt I would have picked it up.
But—and maybe this is itself a reversal one can see coming—this is not the coming-of-age story one expects. Gina is a brilliantly-drawn adolescent character in that she feels herself to be fully grown while she is only inhabiting the inverted simulation of adulthood. The ferocious rules of the Matula and the almost deranged commitment to duty expressed by some of the staff end up playing necessary roles that even the adults themselves can’t anticipate. I don’t think it’s at all a Christian book—I don’t know anything about Szabó’s religious views, though I read that she taught at a Calvinist girls’ school both during the war and while her novels were in political disfavor—but it’s definitely about plain and stubborn virtues that can be both cultivated and hidden by smothering punctiliousness. We learn from retrospective comments fairly early in the book that Gina survives her ordeal, but only by placing herself in the hands of people she has spent three hundred pages despising.
Which gets me to the point: Gina is not an especially attractive character. She is a snob, a fool, pettily vindictive, and shallow. That is to say, she’s a very plausible teenager caught up in events she can’t possibly understand, let alone direct. The novel is full of moments in which her refined pettiness is given pure, clear voice, such as her father’s attempt to give her a necklace as a parting gift before dropping her off. “And I would like to buy you something,” she said. “As a memento. To remind you of me when I’m not here.”
They glanced briefly into one another’s eyes, then both suddenly averted their gaze, as if too much had been said in the silence between them. The jeweler watched uncomprehendingly. He could never have known that what Gina’s look had declared was: And I shall do as much for you, though there is nothing to celebrate. This ashtray here you would see as the sort of thing you gave someone simply out of politeness. Nobody knows better than I that you don’t smoke. But after bringing me all this way and telling me nothing about where you are taking me, or why we are going there, you can’t just hand me a present the way you used to.
And this was the answer in his eyes: Well then, give it to me as to a stranger, if that is what you wish. That’s what we’ve taught you to do, Marcelle [the governess] and I. If you are made a gift by a stranger you should give one in return. One day you will ask my pardon for this. May God grant that we both live to see that day.
A detail near the end of the novel made me think of Susan in the Chronicles of Narnia (I won’t say what it is but I’m guessing you’ll know instantly when you get to it). Then I considered the larger parallels of wartime settings, exile to the hinterlands, and the unpredictable, instantaneous demand to grow up. But there the similarities end. Susan, of course, gets to explore a delightful yarn (and rather poor allegory) with talking animals and pre-modern warfare. Gina has to inhabit the real thing, a living, breathing, punitive structure for making girls into Christians that happens also to be rather flimsy in the face of a 20th century army. The Pevensie children are idealized in Lewis’s peculiar way; they are his “converted pagans” in a world of “apostate puritans.” Susan lapses, it seems, into a gentler version of the mindset in which Gina spends her story. Lewis said he couldn’t write Susan’s story—truer words, etc.—but, well, someone could.
I do not mean to be unfair to Lewis in the comparison. As a writer of fiction, Szabó seems to me as unlike Lewis in skill and ambition as Cormac McCarthy is from Louis L’Amour. There is a time for stories about special swords and chivalrous mice, and what it means to pay their tax on our credulity as people at the last ragged edge of childhood. There is also a time for stories about the whiplash from daydreams we didn’t know were childish into the terrible exigencies of adulthood. Susan becomes a hero—a queen, no less, in a sibling tetrarchy of such historically unexampled stability that it must have involved magic—while Gina unheroically survives. Her story isn’t for everyone, I suppose, but it’s much closer to being about everyone.
And yet there is a great deal of heroism in the novel. The girls are, in their often misdirected way, quite brave, loyal, and resolute (a scene of ritual destruction of rare and precious wartime pastries will linger in my mind). And some of the adults prove to be heroic, albeit without thereby becoming glorious. Miracles are real, but sometimes that’s only because someone is behind the scenes trying to answer the desperate prayers.
From about the third chapter on, I started picturing the novel as a great movie or a totally watchable eight-episode streaming series. It was adapted for television in Hungary in 1978 but, as far as I know, has never been done in English-language media.
Incredible review, will be adding to my to-read list
I really enjoyed this edition. I will put Abigail on my summer reading list!