May 4, 2003

LETHAL as the name may appear, Gail Bell’s first full length work of non fiction is, at best, proof of her dedication to unravelling the mystery shrouding Grandfather Macbeth’s reputation rather then taking for a fact his identity as the murderer, by poison, of his two sons. This is a fascinating detective story and a moving memoir of death and deceit. It is also an eye opener about the presence of poison in seemingly innocent curative medicines. Sydney-born Bell’s account of the project is perhaps more to do with her career as a professional chemist than with ambitions of making a name in the world of detective fiction.

In this case she succeeds marvelously. The book reads like a who’s who of the poison principle; not that just potential poisoners would benefit! In fact, so expertly has Bell woven the intrigue of the family mystery with explorations about the human instinct to poison through historical, mythical and fictional perspectives that the work reads like a colourful encyclopaedia of the principle.

“You could die,” had warned ten-year-old Gail’s father, when fascinated by the glass-stoppered bottles in a lacquered wooden box, she had idly put one to her nose. There was something extraordinarily hush hush about the wooden box and its contents. It belonged to the much-maligned late Dr William Macbeth. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it! But for Bell, the memory lingered eventually to become, decades later, the subject of her first full-length work of non-fiction.

Excavating into the dark world of family secrets, Gail Bell is intrigued how her grandfather, Dr William Macbeth, calm, warm and caring, beholden to the Hippocratic Oath, became a murderer. For so remained his sole identity, turning him into a walled in ghost, with aging sister-in-law Rose taking the story into final shape. Gail’s ambition is to see the man in the monster. Fortunate to have been a first person audience to aunt Rose when she narrated the poison story just a little before her death, Gail Bell takes up the case from an anthropologist’s point of view backed by the professionalism of a chemist.

As the detective work proceeds, the reader is carried back and forth in time as riveting accounts of famous private and public cases of poisoning are relayed from the human point of view. From accounts of the poison principle in the deaths of Napoleon and Cleopatra, we move on to the many splendoured nuances of poison, as they are present in what we consume as edible delicacies.

In between, the author talks also of the devastating effects of hemlock, belladonna, strychnine and arsenic, substances dispensed as healers. Like a seasoned detective, Bell moves on with wary steps, searching birth certificates, excavating library archives and conducting first person interviews for judging the tone of newspaper reports at the time of Macbeth’s son’s deaths. They were supposedly murdered by the father the greatest alibi against whom appears to have been his reputation of playing tricks calling summarily assumed identities.

It takes over 250 pages of print before Bell calls it a day, having convinced herself and her readers of Grandfather Macbeth’s innocence. A debt of love and honour well settled indeed! Reading which as a work of non-fiction, readers come away much the wiser about the ‘poison principle’ as it is present in what we do in our day — eat food we did not prepare, eat food we prepared but did not grow, garden with chemicals, wait on corners breathing fumes, swim in rivers — all small acts of will that can lead to death by poisoning with no investigator any the wiser.

 

The Poison Principle: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings

By Gail Bell Macmillan.

Available at Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400. Tel: 021-4310030

Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk

ISBN 0-333-98915-5. 273pp. Rs745

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