Ghosts may not help in fixing familial bonds, but they can certainly do the paperwork. In Daisy Rockwell’s Alice Sees Ghosts, they flit across the pages not to haunt, but to intervene, largely helping out in legal matters related to property disputes and annuities. There is nothing gruesome or grotesque here; even when skeletons tumble out of the closet, it is in a bloodless, somewhat clichéd fashion. Rockwell leans into the absurdity of law, as Charles Dickens once quipped, “the law is an ass,” which takes forever to fumble along in a clumsy, corrupt, inconvenient, and incompetent manner to a mostly unsatisfactory conclusion. It is probably why the author decided that ghostly intervention is just about the only thing that can grease the rusty wheels and smooth the process of the law.
Few things in our troubled world inflict trauma like relatives. Rockwell explores this through the protagonist Alice who returns to an ancestral home that is falling apart, to be with her grandmother on her deathbed, and her mother, a raging alcoholic. Of course, it is not the property alone that is crumbling. Death, grief, and long-buried family tensions refuse to resolve themselves, even with perfectly competent psychiatrists and friendly ghosts. A psychiatrist in the book, painfully aware of his inability to help with the mental unravelling of a certain nature, realises that there is little to be done except go with the flow and play along, even if it means entertaining the most delusional notions.
“He lacks facility with descriptive language,” a character remarks about another. But this is not an obstacle for Rockwell. The narrative drifts with fluidity and otherworldly charm, allowing the reader to engage with this dreamlike landscape and its assortment of quirky characters who, like the ghosts, are bloodless. Alice herself is a waif, wafting through situations with effortless detachment, handling obstacles or difficulties by flat-out refusing to handle or even acknowledge any type of unpleasantness. She won’t even read the newspapers because they carry reports about non–existent weapons of mass destruction to justify a war and other evidence of harsh reality. Instead, she survives like a fragment of a dream, fortified by tea with cream, sugar, and shortbread cookies.
Alice Sees Ghosts touches on aphasia, bigamy, the struggles of being gay when it was not acceptable, and the “neocolonial accumulation of wealth from decolonised places.” But like its heroine, it is a little too refined, reluctant to dig into anything that lacks grace or charm. It coasts carefully, avoiding complexity, sharp edges, and dirt. And in the end, love and blood ties win over festering resentment. Which makes sense, in a dream populated by ghosts.
At the heart of it all, it’s the fragile bond that families share, and ties that refuse to break, that hold the story together.