Facial Justice: Jael Bait

Facial Justice by L.P. Hartley

It was Anthony Burgess, writing in his 1984 overview volume 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, who first made me aware of L.P. Hartley’s truly remarkable creation Facial Justice. In his essay in that volume, Burgess tells us that Hartley’s novel is “a brilliant projection of tendencies already apparent in the post-war British welfare state.” It is one of the very few sci-fi novels that the Clockwork Orange author chose to spotlight in his book, and despite his rather stodgy pronouncements and pedantic manner, I made a mental note to seek out that Hartley novel one day. And, as it turns out, I am so glad I did. An impressive blending of dystopian, postapocalyptic and feminist genres, the book is surely one that will appeal to fans of any one of those three categories.

Facial Justice was initially released by the British publisher Hamish Hamilton as a hardcover in 1960. A year later, in the U.S., Doubleday would come out with its own hardback version featuring some beautiful cover art by one Vera Bock. Over the decades, six more editions would be forthcoming, including one in 1965 from the Italian publisher Aldo Martello under the title Giustizia Facciale. And happily for readers today, there is the copy that I was fortunate enough to acquire … the 2022 incarnation from the fine folks at Valancourt Books.

Now, before I begin singing this novel’s praises, a quick word on the author himself. Leslie Poles Hartley was born in Cambridgeshire in 1895, and today is best remembered as the author of some two dozen novels and short-story collections. Two of his earliest releases, Night Fears (1924) and The Killing Bottle (1932), were apparently comprised of chilling/spooky tales, but the author is supposedly best known for his EUSTACE AND HILDA TRILOGY (1944’s The Shrimp and the Anemone, 1946’s The Sixth Heaven, and 1947’s Eustace and Hilda), as well as his 1953 novel The Go-Between. Hartley passed away in 1972 at the age of 76.

As to Facial Justice itself, the book is indeed set in a postapocalyptic age, after WW3 has wiped out 9/10 of the human race and leveled almost everything during a nuclear holocaust. After decades of living underground in cavern systems, one group resists the authorities that be and sets up a colony aboveground, led by a never-seen Dictator. Hartley’s tale commences 15 years following this Exodus to the surface. It is a bleak, flattened landscape in Cambridge, this area where the book is set; one in which practically every structure from the olden days has been obliterated. To maintain order, the well-meaning yet invisible Dictator has laid down a strict set of rules, in the hopes of establishing equality (Good E) amongst the people, and eliminating envy (Bad E); also referred to as Good Egg and Bad Egg. As part of the overall plan, the donning of sackcloth has been encouraged, all the citizens are compelled to adopt the names of famous historic murderers or murderesses, cars (responsible for so much death and mayhem in olden times) have been outlawed, the ingestion of daily sedatives is required, and the tuning in to the Dictator’s frequent radio chats is practically mandatory. Angelic Inspectors police the streets to enforce discipline and impose small fines on any slackers. And, perhaps most drastic of all, there is the matter of facial equality, to prevent Bad E. Thus, any woman with an Alpha face (read: pretty, attractive, beautiful) is strongly encouraged to undergo surgery to bring her features down to a Beta level, a synthetic skin overlay being applied in a process known as Betafication. Homely Gamma women, on the other hand, can upgrade their physiognomy to the Beta level, resulting in a society in which no female might experience Bad E based on looks. (Men, significantly, are exempt from this ruling, the Dictator suspecting that males do not become jealous or envious over other men’s appearance.)

Against this backdrop the reader encounters Jael 97, an Alpha female, age 19, whose time for Betafication (as opposed to “beatification”!) is at hand. Jael lives with her older brother Joab, a statistician for whom she works as a secretary. But as the obedient Jael begins to enter the Equalization (Faces) Center on page 1 of Hartley’s book, she encounters her friend Judith, a former Gamma who had been Betafied. Judith convinces Jael not to go through with the procedure, resulting in a serious reproof from Joab as well as the inevitable disapproving stares from the town’s citizens. To further declare her independence, Jael takes a very-much-frowned-upon bus excursion to look at one of the last edifices standing, the Ely Cathedral, where she further tempts fate by relishing the prospect of height (all buildings in the new, leveled Cambridge are a mere couple of stories tall). A bus accident during the return trip lands Jael in the hospital, after having been rescued from the scene by a handsome, kindly Inspector who had earlier taken a liking to her Alpha face. But while lying unconscious in hospital, a fast one is pulled, and Jael ultimately discovers that, very much against her will, she has been given a permanent Beta face! Thus, having lost her precious individuality, along with the handsome Inspector’s love, Jael, her hated new face covered by a veil, sets herself on a course of vengeance, vowing to not only kill the Dictator, but to also bring down the society as it currently stands…

Now, if this setup of a government bureaucracy compelling young women to alter their appearance strikes you as seeming familiar, it might be because you’ve read Charles Beaumont’s 1952 short story “The Beautiful People,” which was later filmed as the 1/24/64 Twilight Zone episode entitled “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You.” But in Beaumont’s story, 18-year-old Mary Cuberle is forced by the powers that be to undergo the change; Jael only experiences some societal disapproval after refusing to be voluntarily Betafied … before her sneaky hospital doctor takes matters into his own hands, that is. And Mary’s society forces these facial and bodily changes for purely aesthetic reasons, whereas the Dictator in Jael’s reality is endeavoring to eliminate envy and hard feelings. And, of course, Hartley’s novel permits a much more in-depth look at the society in question than Beaumont’s short story.

Jael, it must be said, is a splendid character who undergoes numerous changes during the course of Hartley’s novel. At first content with her lot, she gradually becomes defiant, outraged, lovesick (after having lost her Inspector), cunning, desperate and ultimately noble. Her intelligence, not apparent at first, becomes increasingly pronounced as we witness her schemes for causing the Dictator’s downfall, all of them brilliantly subtle. Her Beta face will perhaps cause some readers to be reminded of Edith Scob’s masked mug in the great-great French horror film Eyes Without a Face (1959), although the features of the Scob character were completely immobile, unlike Jael’s waterproof and slightly moveable ones. And Hartley also gives us an interesting bunch of well-drawn secondary characters, most especially Joab and Judith.

Any number of well-handled sequences are to be had in Hartley’s book. My favorites: Jael and her fellow tourists, overcome by the prospect of height at the Ely Cathedral, break into spontaneous song and dance around it; Jael, half swooning after that bus accident, seems to fly through the clouds (possibly because she is flying through the clouds) with her rescuer, the Inspector; Jael experiencing both shock and dismay when she first sees her new face; and finally, the ultimate confrontation between Jael and the Dictator (and I’ll admit that the Dictator’s actual identity did come as a stunning surprise to me!). As I just inferred, Hartley manages a most impressive bit of world building here, too. The half dozen rules that I mentioned earlier are just the iceberg tip of what the author ultimately gives us. It is a very credible society that Hartley depicts, and he fleshes out his conceit with a wealth of imaginative touches. Thus, we are told that the weather in this post-nuclear Cambridge is like an eternal March, and that the sun never manages to peek out from the perpetual cloud cover. Flowers are practically extinct, and the real live cineraria that the Inspector gives to Jael to place next to her hospital bed (as opposed to the other patients’ plastic flowers) becomes the poor woman’s most prized possession. The maximum speed for the six existent buses, we learn, is 7½ miles per hour (kind of like NYC’s Van Wyck Expressway on a good day!), and practically all buildings have rounded edges, due to the Dictator’s (unexplained) “aversion to angles and straight lines.” The Dictator’s lengthy radio talks are unfailingly fascinating, and the slogans that are promulgated by the government are seemingly endless (“Beta is best,” “Nature is nasty,” “Alpha is antisocial,” and on and on). Yes, it is a fully realized society, and Hartley’s story is at once finely written, impressively intelligent, totally unpredictable, and really quite mysterious.

I have very few complaints to levy against the author’s very fine work here, other than him referring to Jael’s brother as “Joab 98” on page 12 of this Valancourt edition, and then as “Joab 32” on page 32. Something of a major oopsie, that! Also, I would have liked to have found out more concerning certain tantalizing aspects that we learn about only fleetingly. To wit, what is going on with the society that remained underground? Who was the mysterious child who had led the Exodus to the surface 15 years earlier? And most crucially, what might happen following this book’s very surprising denouement? It is an ending that practically cries out for a sequel, as Hartley apparently had no problem providing in that EUSTACE AND HILDA TRILOGY and would go on to do in his novels The Brickfield (1964) and its sequel The Betrayal (1966). Still, Facial Justice does manage to stand on its own, and makes for a very worthy addition to the dystopian, postapocalyptic and feminist catalogs. I would love to read some more of Hartley’s work now, especially those two early collections of horror, which were cobbled together by Arkham House in 1948 to create the volume entitled The Travelling Grave and Other Stories. Fortunately, that book is also available today from Valancourt, and I hope to be experiencing it soon…