Is it possible to review a book objectively if there’s a lot of buzz around it — especially if it has been shortlisted for a prestigious literary prize like Man Booker, asked a friend who resists all hyped up stuff. Can you review a book as a stand-alone work, for instance, if it is a part of a series and you haven’t read the other works of the author, asked another friend who saw me walking around with this bulky book.
On hearing that it’s a chilling ghost story, colleagues recalled ghost jokes. My own favourite is this silly one that resonates in the review: One ghost to another: Do you really believe in people?
There were more questions, though. What kind of a ghost story transcends pulp to achieve literary status? On the face of it, it’s a rather simple story designed to give you the creeps. A two-century old house, decaying slowly, going to seed. Its once blue-blooded aristocratic residents, the Ayres family — daughter Catherine, son Roderick and their mother Mrs Ayres — now out-of-sync with post-war Britain and fighting a hopeless battle against insanity and blurring class identities. Into their lives enters an eligible bachelor doctor, Dr Faraday, son of working class parents, practising medicine in rural Warwickshire, where the
story is set. He is a rational, but at times confused and doubting, witness to the strange happenings.
The novel highlights the contrasts — the marginalisation of gentry vis-a-vis the rise of the middle and working class (as evident in the characters of the doctor and the domestic help in mansion). Dr Faraday is drawn towards the spinster Catherine with whom he falls in love — and half way through the book he even has a botched sexual encounter with her. But things get complicated for the doctor when he offers medical help to the scion of the family, Roderick, who has been resenting his growing importance in the Ayres family. Mrs Ayres adds
a critical dimension to the eerie tale with her disturbing memories.
Beneath the microcosm of the characters are the signposts that guide the reader
through the maze of changing Britain. The turmoil in the inner worlds of the characters could be the metaphor for the convulsions experienced by British society in the ’40s. In the last chapter, a rational explanation to all the tragic and
mysterious happenings is offered by a friend of the doctor: the haunted house is “in effect defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world” and its residents “unable to advance with the times, simply opted for a retreat — for suicide and madness”. He speculates that this was not limited to one family, but has had happened to several old gentry families across England.
The veneer of rationality in no way lessens the intrigue. The characters are so real, their lives so authentic that the strange happenings do make for eerie reading. For the life infused into the tale, the author probably owes as much to her imagination and creativity as the few non-fictional books on subjects such as poltergeist phenomena, country doctors and country houses in Warwickshire that she acknowledges. Added to this, the author’s ambivalence — not ruling out the presence of a supernatural ‘little stranger’ in the mansion.
As she explained in an interview published on the Booker official website, “Even though I don’t really believe in ghosts, I am a sucker for a good ghost story... What interests me most about ghost stories, actually, is not whether they’re true or not, but the simple fact that they exist.”
The brilliance is in the story, the narrative, the setting, the craft; and, before you realise it you have surrendered to the author’s spooky magic — sometimes willingly suspending your rational beliefs and getting drawn into the plot. As I relished reading the book, I figured that the Booker hype and my questions had retreated into some dark nook of irrelevance... Booooo!
The author teaches at Asian College of Journalism, Chennai
mohan.word@gmail.com
