The Triple Echo - H E Bates

 THE TRIPLE ECHO - H E BATES

It's my contention that rather than Vanessa Redgrave it should have been Glenda Jackson who starred in Ken Russell's 'The Devils'. She would have made the perfect possessed nun and would probably have been down on the church floor with the rest of them, shedding her robes and cavorting for all she's worth around the pews. In fact, she may well have insisted on it even if it wasn't in the script. For authenticity. 

Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson made for a good pairing when cast together in Ken Russell's 'Women In Love' though it wasn't until the following year after the release of The Devils that they came together again in the film adaptation of H E Bates' The Triple Echo.

When it comes to films based on books and vice versa, the question always rises as to which is better: the book or the film? Nine times out of ten the book wins but when it comes to The Triple Echo I'd say it's a draw. Both have their merits but then both have their shortcomings. The merits are in the compactness and brevity of the main characters playing out their respective roles against a background of a wide open landscape under a vast sky. The main problem of both is in the story's central premise.

It's World War Two and a 'war widow' whose husband has been taken prisoner by the Japanese is living alone at subsistence level on an isolated farm somewhere in the English countryside. She one day comes upon a young soldier out wandering around on his day off from the local Army barracks, and after no time at all they become lovers.

Together, rather than him going back to his regiment it's decided he should stay with her at the farm, disguising himself as a woman with fake breasts and all. To quell suspicions when anyone asks, she tells them that it's her sister who has come to stay a while.

Into the mix enters another soldier (in the film played by Oliver Reed), a very uncouth and brutish man who takes a shine to the woman's 'sister' and gets 'her' to go to a Christmas Eve dance being held at the barracks. It's at this point that everything starts to unravel. 

On one level, The Triple Echo can be read as a description of one of the more unusual sorrows of war but on another level it can be read a bit more lightly: War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing apart from men dressing as women only to then invite the amorous advances of Oliver Reed.

Was H E Bates an inhibited and repressed cross-dresser, I wonder? A would-be sweet transvestite? Was him writing The Triple Echo a way of safely coming out of his closet under the guise of fiction? Everyone likes a bit of cross-dressing, for sure. It's only natural. So is The Triple Echo the equivalent of H E Bates sending a message in a bottle, with the hope that it might one day wash up on a shore and lead to his rescue? I think it might be.

John Serpico