Evil

Evil is not a single abstract force in the novel but a contested moral word applied to particular acts and their consequences. The sharpest contemporary example is Nathan Oliver’s decision to give Adrian Boyde wine despite knowing that Boyde was an alcoholic trying to remain sober. Emily Holcombe sees the act as planned cruelty: Oliver wanted to observe an alcoholic’s relapse for a character in his novel, and arranged to have his subject close at hand. The damage was not merely an episode of drunkenness. Boyde’s more than a year of sobriety was undone, and, as Mrs. Burbridge later stresses, he could have died without Jo Staveley’s intervention. The episode makes artistic curiosity morally culpable when it turns another person’s suffering into material to be controlled and observed.

Evil as Deliberate Harm

The account of Boyde’s relapse distinguishes Oliver’s petty unpleasantness from what Mrs. Burbridge considers genuinely evil. She lists his bad temper, complaints about Dan Padgett’s inefficiency, dissatisfaction with late meals, and irritation when the boat was unavailable. These grievances made him disliked, but she does not equate them with the calculated act against Boyde. Her judgment rests on intention and consequence: Oliver knew about Boyde’s alcoholism, invited him to supper, and supplied the wine in order to watch what happened. Boyde’s effort to resist his addiction became, in Oliver’s hands, an experiment conducted for literary observation.

Holcombe and Mrs. Burbridge give Boyde the contrasting moral position of a good man. Holcombe says that he had lost faith in religious dogma and struggled with the problem of a world in which innocent people suffer. She identifies with the thought that good and evil might be opposed forces, a view Adam Dalgliesh names as Manichaeanism. Her example is the experience of watching a child die of cancer: the suffering of the innocent makes a simple account of an all-good, all-powerful God difficult for her to accept. The idea offers her a way to name evil without reducing Boyde to his alcoholism or treating his suffering as deserved.

That moral division also has limits. Holcombe’s emphatic opposition between Oliver as evil and Boyde as good expresses the force of her condemnation, but Dalgliesh cautions that if the distinction were as simple as it sounds, his work would be easy. The contrast helps explain how Oliver’s conduct is remembered, yet it cannot by itself resolve every question of motive, guilt, or responsibility. Mrs. Burbridge, for her part, asks Dalgliesh not to question Boyde about his alcoholism. Her willingness to speak about Oliver’s harm is paired with a promise to protect the survivor from having his past reopened.

Guilt, Talent, and the Limits of Judgment

Holcombe connects Oliver’s wrongdoing with his fear of decline and death. She says he dreaded losing his literary power: his talent had defined him, and without it he imagined himself becoming a shell. He also feared death and carried guilt. In her view, abandoning belief in a personal God had not freed him from guilt; it left him with the psychological burden of wrongdoing without the consolation of absolution. This is Holcombe’s interpretation, not a complete account of Oliver’s inner life, but it places his artistic ambition beside his capacity to exploit another person.

His death intensifies the moral uncertainty rather than settling it. Holcombe cannot believe that Oliver killed himself, despite evidence that appears to support suicide. She reasons that he feared death and would have chosen a less degrading method if he had intended to end his life. Her insistence is shaped by her sense of what Oliver feared and by her judgment of him; it is not presented as proof of who killed him. The distinction matters: condemning Oliver’s evil act against Boyde does not make every account of Oliver’s own death certain, or make his death a simple moral balancing of wrongs.

The Buried Wartime Crime

The history of the Combe Island lighthouse carries the moral problem back to 1940. Emily Holcombe recounts what Saul Oliver told her shortly before his death: three Germans from the occupied Channel Islands landed on the island, and Saul set fire to dry straw on the lighthouse’s ground floor while they were in the tower. With the lantern railings unsafe and the door nailed shut, the men could not escape; all three died, probably of suffocation. Saul later carried their bodies to their boat and scuttled it. Holcombe calls his action murder, and she says the men died horribly and to no purpose.

The story had been hidden behind the absence of public inquiry and Saul’s concealment of the boat. He kept a revolver, binoculars, and a compass as trophies, then gave them to Holcombe. She threw them into the sea because she regarded the killings as murder and wanted no reminder of what she had learned. She did not contact the German authorities, believing the story would bring no comfort to the men’s families. Dr. Speidel’s arrival decades later supplied the first confirmation beyond Saul’s souvenirs. Holcombe also reveals that Saul had not acted alone: he took the child Nathan and Tom Tamlyn with him. The disclosure implicates the island’s past in a chain of knowledge and silence that reaches into the next generation.

Memory and Moral Consequence

Evil persists in the narrative not only through the original acts but through the choices made afterward: concealing a crime, refusing to disclose it, protecting a vulnerable person, or deciding that a truth would cause harm without offering consolation. Holcombe’s account of Saul and her condemnation of Oliver differ in their circumstances, but both insist that suffering cannot be made morally neutral by calling it an experiment, a wartime deed, or a private secret. At the same time, the novel preserves the difficulty of judgment: the people who speak about evil have partial knowledge, personal histories, and obligations to the living.

After Oliver’s murder, Mrs. Burbridge recalls that Boyde was deeply affected by the death because he understood evil. The response links his relapse and survival to the larger case without suggesting that his suffering makes him responsible for Oliver’s fate. In this way, evil is measured less by a person’s reputation than by what a deliberate act does to another human being—and by what those who witness or inherit that act choose to remember, conceal, or protect.