Sunny Side Up

THERE IS, OF COURSE, the great Jane Austen question in fiction. There will always be those who feel that the plot's the thing. No matter how rich the prose, no matter how sharp the dialogue, no matter how true the perceptions of human nature, how important can a book be if its plot ranges no further than the marriage hopes of a few country girls?

Unfortunately, there is a large contingent of these plot-seekers among today's readers. Theirs is the soap-opera or bad science-fiction approach to literature. Squeeze in a sufficient number of strange romantic liaisons, family scandals, new and improved forms of alien visitors, and so on, and the actual words in which these twists are conveyed are relatively unimportant. Throw in great wars or scheming terrorists, and the author need barely be literate.

Gillian Freeman, who is quite literate, is a writer in the Austen tradition. With its gothic surprise ending and all, the plot of An Easter Egg Hunt could be summarized in a couple of lines. Yet Freeman does more than merely tell a story. She re-creates an era. The story is set in the famed English countryside, during World War I. The Great War intrudes on the narrative no more than it intrudes on the small girls' school in which the action transpires. Tightened food supplies and army cadets training nearby are the only evidence in the girls' little world that the larger world is being made safe for democracy.

Freeman brings freshness and wit to what is essentially a literary cliche: the world microcosm, the great passions of the large war replicated on a smaller scale, not among nations, but among a small group of individuals. In the beginning there is peace and a rustic scene of a small girls' school preparing for a charity Easter egg hunt. This Easter peace is broken when one of the young students at the school is discovered to be missing.

To a reader concerned only with plot, the yield is relatively low. The pastoral is an ancient tradition. Small schools for the young daughters of the leisure classes have had more literary attention, certainly, than their numbers have called for. Freeman has missed no gothic twists here--ghost sightings, illicit trysts, sensual foreigners, even secret abortions.

But like the Easter eggs she writes about, Freeman's tale is delicately and colorfully sketched. From afar, it is a bright and cheerful scene. Poor closely, however, and you begin to see the delicate flaws of the picture. Only then can you see the missed brush strokes and splotches splenty hidden in this pastoral scene.

THE LURKING SENSUALITY that is bound to make itself known in this story of a secluded girls' school down the road from a cadets' training camp is shown subtly first, in a palate of fine detail. There are vague whispers that an old, established widow in town never quite bothered to marry the man whose money she is now living off. And there is a great image of repressed sexual yearning in the school mistress who, ever mindful of war shortages, has the cook bake only one chocolate cake a week, which she single-handedly eats in seclusion.

This attention to detail allows for subtle echoings and image patterns. There is, for example, a recurrent image of infertility. Marriages that were never really marriages. A long line of titled nobility ending in an imbecile son. Secret abortions. And of course the primary image, the decorated, but hollowed-out, Easter egg.

Yet perhaps the greatest charm of the book is its subtle disingenuousness. It bridges two worlds, because no matter how great its sympathy for the era it describes, it was written today, and its sensibilities are as wise as our own. A scene in which a cadet shows off his skill with an airplane for his sweetheart from the girls' school begins with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the era, but just a few words later and Freeman is describing the nosedive with modern phallic abandon. Later on, a troubled character exclaims that not even "Professor Freud" could explain his malady. Freeman seems to suggest ironically that perhaps he could.

In an odd way, the story is nostalgia updated. The reader is given a tale of a time long ago, but gently prodded to make sense of it in a modern context. Yet despite the fact that Freeman has our values and knows the same literary buzz words we do, she succeeds in re-creating an era on its own terms--an era for which Freud had no answers, when a young lady's unchaperoned absence raised eyebrows, and when Easter egg hunts were actually fun.