With the publication of Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, Steven Carroll brings to a close his Eliot Quartet based on characters from the life of the poet T S Eliot. This final novel focusses on the Vivienne, Eliot's troubled first wife, the one who was said to be an hysteric and a harridan. In real life TSE left the marriage and she ended up in an asylum, unvisited by TSE who was busy being famous in a way that few poets are. In Carroll's novel he is a celebrity, at a time when the word had barely been invented.

And Britain is at war with Germany. It is July 1940 and the streets are sandbagged but the real horror of the Blitz is yet to come. Into this impending chaos comes Vivienne, successfully making her escape from the asylum with the help of her sympathetic friend Louise Purdoy and George from the Lunacy Law Reform Society. Vivienne is in the hands of a covert network of people who engineer escapes from asylums so that the inmate can take advantage of an old law which offered the possibility of freedom to anyone who could break out and stay free for 30 days. Louise Purdoy thinks that Vivienne is as sane as anybody else, and so she wants to help her.

Vivienne, of course, has to lie low, as any escapee does, but she doesn't. She likes to be out and about, as anyone does. (I suspect that Carroll's experience of Melbourne's Lockdowns influenced her realistic yearning to escape being confined indoors.) Fatally, perhaps, she just can't resist a TSE public appearance where he is to do a reading of 'East Coker', (the second of his Four Quartets, published in real life in 1940.)

Vivienne turning up and creating a scene at a public appearance is exactly what TSE fears, and he has powerful friends. She had been committed in the first place because of a public 'episode' involving a knife and hysterical rantings about TSE being beheaded. Adding to the panic is a stabbing episode involving a Lord and his ex-wife. So Detective Stephen Minter is assigned to find Vivienne ASAP.

Minter might be a fugitive too, of a sort. His parents fled anti-Semitism in Australia, and he grew up in England. They are secular Jews and have settled into English life well, but they (like Minter himself) are at risk of being interned as Aliens. He has worked hard to assimilate, masking his accent and (in passages reminiscent of The Gift of Speed (2004) from Carroll's Glenroy novels) becoming devoted to cricket. But just as TSE can't quite shake off his Missouri origins, Minter retains slight traces of his past. And just as TSE is not really part of the British Establishment, much as he would like to be, Minter isn't really on their side. He's not sure that he wants to find Vivienne. He's not convinced that she is insane. But he does have an Englishman's sense of duty...

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Goodnight, Vivienne , Goodnight.
The final chapters caught me up in the drama and suspense when TSEliot is delivering a speech to an audience.
The novel started out slowly, but the rescue of Vivienne from the asylum was exciting. Then the detective searching for her.
The flirtatious friendship between Stephen and Brigid was charmingly told, and her playful abuse of the siren had me laughing.
The affair with Bertrand Russell kept my interest, as was Stephen’s interview with T S Eliot in chapter 6.
It wasn’t all engaging, sometimes lost my interest.
I was impelled into learning about The Wasteland, ‘the greatest literary work in the twentieth century’. I found out why it was revolutionary in the history of English literature.
What would Stephen do when he caught Vivienne? the suspense in the final chapter was wonderful. I reacted physically. ( )