43 pages • 1-hour read
A Great Deliverance
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of illness, death, child death, sexual violence and harassment, rape, child sexual abuse, child abuse, emotional abuse, disordered eating, and sexual content.
The Corrosive Nature of Guilt
Guilt is one of the main motivators for many of the characters’ actions in the novel, and it manifests in a number of ways. Whether directed toward another person or toward the character themselves, actions motivated by guilt are nearly always harmful and create more problems than they solve, leading to a destructive cycle.
William’s murder is the catalyst for the plot, and the destructive nature of his actions are gradually revealed as the facts unfold. William was a pedophile who preyed on his daughters. In the community, however, he was known as an upstanding man. A devout Catholic, he understood the cycle of sin and guilt. He felt guilty for his sins and even confessed them to Father Hart, but he could not stop. The corrosive guilt he felt manifested as increased religiosity and increased violence against his victims. The novel’s title, A Great Deliverance, refers to the Lord’s Prayer, in which Catholics ask God to deliver them from evil. This implies that William’s deliverance came not at God’s hands, but at Roberta’s, ending his cycle of guilt and abuse.
As Havers and Lynley investigate the case and, through the course of their investigation, they are forced to confront their own guilty pasts. Lynley and Havers both feel guilty about harm that came to loved ones in the past. Even if events were not in their control, such as Simon St. James’s injury or Tony Havers’s death, they feel the need to atone for their actions. This leads them to seek self-punishing situations and alienates them emotionally from others. Both develop defense mechanisms to keep others distant and destroy potentially positive relationships.
The tension between the two inspectors helps to fuel their introspection into these dynamics, particularly when Havers directly confronts Lynley about his womanizing behavior. Any sympathy that she might have felt for him, she says, has been wiped away by his decision to have sex with Stepha Odell. While Lynley believes that Havers is largely misinformed, he is forced to acknowledge a grain of truth in her accusation. His womanizing is, in part, a manifestation of an unspoken guilt. Rather than misogynism or chauvinism, however, he comes to realize that his frequent and unsatisfying relationships stem from his failure to get over his love for Deborah. Likewise, his refusal to give up on his love for her leaves her in an awkward position, particularly after her marriage. Lynley recognizes his failures and feels guilt for what he has done.
Similarly, the case helps Havers to come to terms with her own actions and the way in that she tried to manipulate her parents into feeling guilt about Tony, only to further confuse their understanding of reality. She, too, feels guilty for what she has done. It is through the case—and particularly the way in which the case exposes unexpressed and unresolved guilt—that Havers and Lynley are able to achieve individual moments of catharsis.
The Dangers of Class Bias in Great Britain
A Great Deliverance is set during the 1980s, a period of social upheaval in Great Britain, which is evident in the dynamic between Havers and Lynley. The two inspectors are thrown together on the case, in part because they are anomalies in the British police. Havers is a working-class woman marginalized by her peers. While she is rarely treated with open contempt, she must work twice as hard to achieve half the success of her male counterparts. While Havers struggles in every aspect of her life, Lynley is a wealthy aristocrat who seems to treat policework as a hobby. Havers believes that Lynley has never needed to work hard in his life and that he has been able to buy his promotions in a way that she never could. Lynley resents Havers’s assumptions, but he has no means of proving her wrong. He can never step away from his privilege and can therefore never prove that he can succeed on his own merit.
The tension between Havers and Lynley takes place in a society preoccupied with class. In the buildup to the case, the contrast between the upper and working class is shown by the neighborhoods in which they live. Lynley lives in an “elegant white building” (60) in the expensive Belgravia neighborhood in West London. Havers notes that this is his home in the city; he also has a country estate in Cornwall. By contrast, Havers lives in Acton with her parents. While Acton is also in West London, it is described in negative terms. The neighborhood is cramped, noisy, rundown, and coated in a “desperate grime” (80) that speaks to the diminished hopes of the residents. The rich and the poor live alongside each other in West London, but their fortunes do not intertwine. The landowners live next to the renters, the businessmen live next to their employees, and few people in the society are able to forget the extent to which class position dictates the course of their lives.
The prevalence of class tensions in the novel can also be seen in a broader sense, particularly in the transition between north and south. During the 1980s, the north of England entered into a period of economic decline. Yorkshire, where the novel was set, dealt with the loss of the coal trade and the accusations that the Conservative government at the time was instituting a policy of managed decline for the regions which were not in the south of England. As Havers and Lynley ride the train north, away from the economic hub of London, they bear witness to this decline. The view of the rich townhouses of London gives way to fields, then to shuttered factories and struggling communities. Their journey north is, in effect, a tour of the economic decline of the region, nuanced by the different perspectives of the main characters.
How Patriarchy Enables Predatory Behavior Among Men
As well as class tensions, A Great Deliverance explores gender expectations and power from the male and female perspective. Just as Havers and Lynley represent competing class positions in the context of the novel, their genders are key to their characterization. Lynley’s reputation, for example, is that of a womanizer. His reputation is built, in part, on Havers having loudly accused him of showing “a willingness to screw everything in sight” (68). Though Lynley tried to defuse the situation, the incident has stuck with him, not least because there is an element of truth to Havers’s accusation. He does have sex with many women, and he flirts with even more. He congratulates himself on declining sex with Stepha Odell on one occasion, only to indulge his urges several nights later. Havers is not wrong to accuse Lynley of being a womanizer, nor is she wrong to point out that men during this time are given tacit social permission to have multiple sexual partners, a freedom not accorded to women (as made evident by the later discussions around Gillian’s sexuality). Havers resents this because she feels disempowered by Lynley’s sexuality; his promiscuity serves as a constant reminder to her of the patriarchal nature of society. To Lynley, his actions feed an unflattering but ultimately harmless reputation. To Havers, they demonstrate the different powers afforded to men and women in society.
Havers’s distrust of Lynley’s latent misogyny alludes to the broader way in which women in the novel are treated as sexual objects by male characters. Gillian is in danger of being “preyed on by a pimp” (235) at the moment when she has just escaped the home of her abuser, showing how a vulnerable woman in this society is in danger of being abused. Gillian was helped by Testament house, then she began to help other girls in a similar position. This desire to help other women and girls is, in part, motivated by her own experience of abuse and her inability to help Roberta. Roberta, in contrast, acted to help Bridie but, without any social support, the only thing she felt she could do was commit a crime. The recourses available to women to deal with abuse and exploitation are lacking, the novel suggests, as the Teys women’s actions are driven by desperation rather than malice.
The novel explores the gender dynamics of violence and victimhood in its subplot of the Railway Ripper serial murder case in London. The Railway Ripper case takes inspiration from the real-life case of Peter Sutcliffee, a serial killer who preyed on women in the North of England in the 1980s and who was dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper by the press. Sutcliffe’s namesake in A Great Deliverance does not appear in the narrative, nor is the case solved. Instead, the presence of the Railway Ripper provides an illustration of the ambient level of violence which exists in the society at this time. The novel inverts expectations of gendered violence, however, by recasting the Ripper’s victims as male. There is a class element implied as well since the killings happen near London’s railway stations. The Ripper isn’t targeting wealthy men, but those of the middle or working class. This gives the novel a subplot to explore in the disappearance of Tessa’s husband. The Ripper may not be found, but the killer’s actions serve to demonstrate that violence and murder have their own gender expectations attached in the minds of the audience.
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