W.G. Sebald's Vertigo

Crossposted at Of Books and Bicycles

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. Vertigo is my second book by W.G. Sebald; I wrote about The Rings of Saturn here, and I liked that book quite a lot, even though it left me feeling a little bewildered. Now that I have read Vertigo, which is written in a style similar to The Rings of Saturn, I'm less sure what I think of Sebald. Both books are very smart and very thought-provoking, but in both books there's an emotional distance that leaves me a little cold. This seems less true in The Rings of Saturn, but in Vertigo I found it hard to remember what was going on and to keep track of my place in the various stories; this has a lot to do with the fact that Sebald moves quickly and seamlessly from narrative to narrative in a way that is disorienting at times, but I think it also has to do with the emotional distance of the narrator(s). There wasn't enough drawing me into the stories and making me care about what was going on.

Now, I love idea-driven books, whether fiction or nonfiction, so I feel like Sebald should be a favorite writer of mine. But Vertigo makes me realize that an idea-driven book needs to be emotionally compelling as well, because it's when my emotions are involved that I'm most inspired to take time to consider the ideas the writer is working with.

But to back up a bit, Vertigo has four sections, each one telling a different story, or, more accurately, a different series of interconnected stories. Each section is different, but they all deal with memory, sadness, and feelings of disorientation and uncertainty -- the kind of vertigo created by feeling all the sudden alienated from oneself and the surrounding world. The first section describes Stendhal's life, touching on his experiences in war and in love (Sebald never uses the name "Stendhal," though, calling him by his real name, Marie Henri Beyle, and it wasn't until I had finished the section and finally got around to reading the book's back cover that I realized who I had just read about). As a young boy, Beyle marched with Napolean and his army, and as an older man, he tried to remember details of that march. Sebald describes the difficulties Beyle encountered reconciling his memory with the landscape he sees as an older man, thus setting up his theme of the unreliability of memory.

From there the book moves to the story of an unnamed narrator (most likely Sebald himself) who travels around Italy, exploring history (we learn about Casanova, among others) and trying to manage his feelings of uneasiness and uncertainty. Then in the third section we follow Franz Kafka for a while (also suffering emotionally), and finally we return to Sebald as narrator as he describes a journey back to his hometown in Germany. Again, as in the Stendhal section, the narrator describes what it's like to return to formative places as an older person and to confront the difference between reality and memory.

Many of these sections describe powerful emotional experiences -- panic, disorientation, sadness, despair -- and yet it is all described in a flat, emotionless tone. Perhaps what this does is call upon the reader to do more imaginative work to fill in the blanks and to realize for him or herself just what it is the narrator is going through. Certainly the book asks for the reader's participation in figuring out how the four sections connect and what the various vignettes within each section contribute to the overall meaning. And yet I didn't feel inspired to do the work the book seemed to be asking me to do. Perhaps this is my fault, perhaps not, I'm not sure.

At any rate, Sebald is certainly doing interesting things in his writing. I haven't yet touched on the pictures that he includes -- black and white photos that relate to the surrounding text but are without captions, so the reader gets to think about the relationship of narrative and picture. Again, Sebald gives us material and then asks us to do the work of fitting it all together. The project is an interesting and admirable one, and I only wish I had fallen in love with the results.

Vertigo

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald is a curious book made up of four parts that fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The book is filled with literary, musical, and art references, so many in fact that I didn't have time to look them all up.

Part one on Vertigo sets up everything else for the rest of the book. It is a biography of sorts of Marie Henri Beyle, also known as Stendhal. But I did have time to look up Stendhal's biography and Sebald takes some liberties with it but in the scheme of things it doesn't matter. What does matter is that from the start of the Beyle section we are plunged into thinking about the vagaries of memory, how they cannot be trusted, how "in reality, as we know, everything is always quite different," how memories can be displaced by things like photographs.

Memory is dodgy throughout as when the narrator that is Sebald but not Sebald eventually returns to the town in which he grew up only to find what he thought he remembered and knew about it and the people is not necessarily true. He also sees people who aren't really there during the course of his travels like Dante and King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

We also have, beginning in the Beyle section, the introduction of Stendhal's theory that love is a "protracted crystallization process." Sebald carries the argument about love throughout the book as we get the story of Cassanova's incarceration and escape from prison and later Kafka's idea of love which is almost counter to Stendhal's:

Dr. K evolves a fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement. If only we were to open our eyes, he says, we would see that our happiness lies in our natural surroundings and not in our poor bodies which have long since become separated from the natural order of things.

But these ideas about love, far from pertaining only to love, are expanded by Sebald to encompass meditations on memory and identity. Our wandering Sebald narrator who is trying to get over an unexplained difficult period in his life, seems to be trying to crystalize his memories. With crystalized memories things can become fixed including himself and the people he knows or knew, the past and the present as well become stable. But crystallization is impossible when it comes to memory because of memory's instability. Our narrator, and by extension the reader, is in a constant state of vertigo.

Kafka's exhortation to open our eyes also means eyes are everywhere in the book. There are several pictures of people but only of their eyes. The narrator visits an optometrist. He is also an art aficionado who, when studying Pisanello, the paintings "instilled in me the desire to forfeit everything except my sense of vision." But our narrator's eyes looking out a train window see only a gray landscape where there is disengagement but no intimacy and the natural surroundings certainly don't make him happy.

Vertigo is a heady book and even though it is written in very simple and unadorned language, it must be read slowly and carefully. So many pieces are interconnected and recur in unexpected places I am sure I missed quite a lot of them. The whole book is like a giant jigsaw puzzle for which you don't have a picture of what it looks like when it is done. The reader is left to sort through the pieces looking for patterns to ultimately find there is no way to fit all the pieces together, no way to come to any conclusion and bring an end to the vertigo. In spite of this I found the book satisfying. I read a library copy but I think I'd like my own copy someday so I can reread it and mark it up making annotations and cross references and taking my time to look up everything. It won't stop the vertigo, but it might produce an even more lovely whirling kaleidoscope.

This book was a Slaves of Golconda group read. I know quite a few Slaves couldn't make it through for various reasons. If you have read the book or just want to see what we're saying about the book, visit the Slaves blog and our discussion forum.

Oh, and I found a couple of good reviews of the book. One from Salon and one from The New York Times (requires free registration to view).

Cross-posted at So Many Books

The "Winner"

Geez, you all didn’t make this easy! There is a three-way tie with three votes each for Naipaul, Sebald and Calvino. I thought about doing a random pick from the three but since Jodie, even though she voted for A Bend in the River, mentioned that she was also really tempted by the Sebald, I went with that as the tie-breaker, sort of like instant run-off voting.

So it’s Sebald’s Vertigo for Wednesday, March 31st.

Happy reading!

Let's Get Outta Town!

I have the pleasure of offering up choices for the next Slaves of Golconda discussion. Maybe it is a symptom of cabin fever due to the winter doldrums that have descended, but all the books up for vote have some sort of journey at their center. It was hard to come up with a list of books that probably most haven’t read yet. One thing I can say though, there is a good diversity of style to choose from. I gleaned these titles from searching The Globe Corner Bookstore website a fantastic site if there ever was one and a bookstore I would love to visit should I ever find myself wandering around Harvard Square. Unfortunately their book descriptions aren’t always the best, so those I got from Amazon (click the title links for more complete book descriptions). Here’s the list:

• Vertigo by W.G. Sebald. “This exquisitely composed work also undertakes a disorienting, if less somber, journey through historical and personal memory. The first-person narrator travels through Europe during the 1980s, spurred on by history's ghosts and his own melancholic yearning for adventure. Having left his base in England to explore Vienna, Venice and Verona, he concludes with a bittersweet pilgrimage to his hometown in southwestern Germany”



• The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner. “Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Then a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother's birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal that he is not quite spectator enough.”



• The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic. “This novel poses some interesting philosophical questions--who are you, what are you, and what are your memories when your country has disintegrated and even your language has been politicized out of existence? That's what has happened to the narrator and protagonist, Tanja Lucic, ethnically a Croatian, formerly a Yugoslav. Exiled by the Yugoslav ethnic wars of the 1990s and then abandoned by her husband in Berlin, Tanja lands a one-year post at the University of Amsterdam. Her students, with one exception, are fellow exiles enrolled to maintain their refugee status.”



• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. “Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Bend in the River chronicles both an internal journey and a physical trek into the heart of Africa as it explores the themes of personal exile and political and individual corruption.”



• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. " ‘Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’ So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images.”

Cast your votes. I’ll count them up on Friday the 12th. Discussion will start March 31st.

Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper

Cross-posted at Of Books and Bicycles.

Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper was an enjoyable book in moments and a puzzling book in others; it’s one of those books I can’t quite figure out how to respond to, and I’m not sure another reading would help. There’s a lot I liked in the book, but what puzzles me about it is that given the books that appeal to me most, I should love this one, and it turns out I don’t, quite.

I admire its form and structure most; it’s the kind of novel where not much happens and instead we have someone sharing her thoughts with us the entire way through. The main character is called Pompey, and she writes in a way that seems spontaneous, telling us whatever is on her mind at the moment. We hear about her job — she works as a secretary for a certain Sir Phoebus – her love affairs, her friends, her family — especially her aunt, the “Lion of Hull” — and her thoughts about society, literature, and politics.

Basically, there is no form or structure (as far as I can tell), and instead it’s a loose-flowing stream-of-consciousness monologue. Novel on Yellow Paper reminds me most of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist, where there is a structure and plot, but these are so basic they hardly count and the real point of the book is the voice. The pleasure of the book comes from listening to the main character share his thoughts. That’s what we’re offered in Smith’s book — a chance to get inside the main character’s head a little bit.

However, now that I think about it a little more, I’m not sure how much we do get inside Pompey’s head. It’s feels a little more like she uses words to charm and entertain us and to tell us about herself, but in such a way that she hides as much as she reveals. Words are as much a shield for her true self, or a cloud in which to hide, as a way to reveal herself.

She certainly is amusing and charming, and she has funny quirks that make her voice very distinctive. This passage illustrates her use of repetition and rhythm and also shows how frank and open she can be (or appear to be):

Oh how I enjoy sex and oh how I enjoy it. There have been many funny things about sex in my life that have made me laugh and so now I will tell you.

There was once a woman called Miss Hogmanimy. That was certainly a queer name. That was a name you would certainly want to get married out of. But this woman was very queer and wrought up over babies and the way babies are born, and she gave up her whole life going round giving free lectures on how babies are born. And it certainly was queer how ecstatic she got about this way how babies are born, and always she was giving lectures to young girls of school or school-leaving age. And all the time it was mixed up in a way I don’t just remember with not drinking, not drinking alcohol, but just carrying on ginger beer, kola and popgass. And so well this Miss Hogmanimy she got up in our school, now I think it was our school, chapel and so there she was in this school chapel, giving a lecture with illustrating slides to young girls on how babies are born …

…to listen to Miss Hogmanimy you’d think just knowing straight out how babies was born was to solve all the problems of adolescence right off. You’d come out straight and simple and full of hearty fellowship and right thinking if you just got it clear once and for all how babies are born. There’d be no more coming out in spots and getting self-conscious about the senior prefect, nor getting a crush on the English mistress, nor feeling proud and miserable like you do at that time, before you get grown up. There’d be none of this at all if you just knew how babies are born. So there she was.

Pompey is great at this kind of amusing light satire. There is a wonderful section on women’s fiction where she describes the typical “Fiction for the Married Woman,” which is all about learning to be happy with housewifely duties. The section is funny, but there is anger underneath the light surface. She decides that describing fiction for the unmarried woman is just too painful:

I cannot tell you about the stories for unmarried girls, the ones that are so cleverly and coyly oh. And they are so bright and smiling and full of pretty ideas that are all the time leading up to washing-up. You will know how they go but I cannot tell you. I am already feeling: No, I should not have said all this. It is the ugliest thing that could ever have been conceived, because it is also so trivial, so full of the negation of human intelligence, that should be so quick and so swift and so glancing, and so proud. And you Reader, whom I have held by the wrist and forced to listen, I am full of regret for you, because I have forced you to listen to this.

As I type out these passages, I’m thinking about how much I like them and how much I liked quite a few sections of the book. The phrase “so full of the negation of human intelligence” is just great, as is the apology to the reader (I wrote about another great section here).

The problem is that in between these sections I felt impatient and occasionally irritated. I couldn’t follow the way her mind worked very well, and the picture of who Pompey is and what her life is like remained hazy. I wanted a more coherent picture to come together, even if that took a while. I love voice-driven novels where plot is not the focus, but I think I need just a bit more coherence, direction, and forward-movement than I got here.

I also just don’t know anybody who talks like Pompey does or who thinks like she does, and I found her a little hard to believe. I suspect, to be really simple and non-literary-critical about things, that Pompey and I probably wouldn’t be friends. With this kind of novel, I want to be able to imagine having a conversation with the main character, and I’m having trouble imagining it here.

So, to sum up, it’s an original, puzzling, strange, frustratingly quirky book I would have loved to love.

You can read other posts on the novel here and join in the discussion at the forums here.

Smug-pug, c'est moi

Have you ever encountered a voice in fiction that's so like that of someone you know in real life that you're totally freaked out? To the point that you can't stop supplying a projected subtext to the work at hand that you know isn't warranted or at all fair? To the point that the entire novel is tainted by an unwavering sense of foreknowledge as to what you'll have confirmed about the author once you seek out the biographical material, no matter how often you tell yourself not to confuse the writer with her creation?

Such was my experience with Novel on Yellow Paper.

I'd gone into it expecting much enjoyment--I've had a fondness since high school for "Not Waving But Drowning," the one Stevie Smith poem I'd read but had never forgotten. But Pompey Casmilus is such an aural doppelganger to this, ah, real-life counterpart of mine, who continually puts me in the smug-pug foot-on-the-ground role as I'm called upon to save her yet again from drowning, that I found no charm in Pompey's voice--I've become immune over the years to such techniques and no longer appreciate freewheeling tangents meant to detract and delay us both from dealing with the problem at hand. (And that's a pity: I'm Southern and ordinarily love a good tangent.)

My apologies to my fellow Slaves. Maybe I can read this one again some day with a more disinterested ear.

Charming and Frustrating

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith was first published in 1936. Supposedly the novel was written as a result of Smith being told by a publisher when she submitted a book of poetry that she should go and write a novel instead.

Pompey Casmilus works as the secretary of Sir Phoebus at a magazine publishing company. She is frequently bored and so decides to write a novel. She writes it on yellow paper so as not to get it confused with the correspondence she types up and sends out for Sir Phoebus. We are warned by Pompey from the get go that this is not going to be regular novel for she is a "foot-off-the-ground" person and her novel will follow suit. So we can't say she didn't warn us.

The novel has no true plot. Things happen to be sure. Pompey visits a boy she likes, Karl, in Germany and is appalled by what she sees there. She decides later that she can't marry her boyfriend Freddy only to agree to marry him when he proposes and then ends up depressed when Freddy decides he can't marry her and breaks off the engagement. There are stories about girlfriends and a horse named Kismet that she rode once. There are loads and loads of literary references and Pompey has a particular passion for Racine's play Phedre. I thought at first there might be some connection between the novel and Phedre but as far as I can tell there isn't.

The novel is also liberally sprinkled with untranslated French and German and I kept thinking I should look up at least some of it but never did. I'm not sure in the end that it would really have made that much of a difference.

Pompey is both a charming and frustrating character. Sometimes she makes me laugh, like when she is telling about her friend, Harriet, and Harriet's boyfriend:

And Harriet is a darling and listens to him and comforts him for the sins of the whole world, which he must have upon his shoulders. But which were never meant for his shoulders at all. And he is suffering from this development-arrested-at-the-university. But Harriet is very adult, and is suffering from no arrestment in development.

And other times she just goes on and on and I got tired of her incessant voice however charming it is.

The book is very much like a conversation but it is a one-sided conversation where the reader, even though often addressed, is not allowed to get a word in edgewise. We are meant to sit and listen and keep our mouths shut as Pompey rattles on about whatever seems to come to her mind. She is one of those people who always has something to say about everything and keeps going on no matter what because silence would be unbearable.

I wonder if keeping the silence at bay might be the point? In spite of the incessant cheerfulness of Pompey's voice she speaks of being sad, of tragic occurrences, and very often of death. Maybe for Pompey silence equals death so she talks and talks and talks to fill the void because she is terrified of the void. I'm not sure, just a thought.

Novel on Yellow Paper is definitely a book like no other I have ever read. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Even an old New York Times book review didn't help. The book is not exactly a comfortable experience so I can't say I liked it. But I did like it in many respects and those outweigh the overall frustration and confusion.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Literary Tourette's

‘For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.
Oh talking voice, that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?’

Some books are all about the voice, and never more so than Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. In it, Pompey Casmilus, a cumbersome name hard to reconcile with its sly, mercurial, skipping persona, recounts her life as it occurs to her – we hear about her work as a private secretary, about her days lived tranquilly with her aunt, the noble Lion, her failed love affair with Freddy, who wants the kind of marriage and orthodox existence that fleet-footed, butterfly minded Pompey cannot countenance, and about a moving constellation of friends and acquaintances, even odd German strangers who try to pick her up on trains (‘So then he leant across, very magnetic in the eyes and said: I know everything you are thinking. Phew-oops dearie, this was a facer, and a grand new opening gambit I’d never heard before. I could only think to say: Well, well, well.’) And no matter what the subject, whether death, religion, Nazi Germany, lost love or Russian drama, Pompey’s voice plays and toys with it, casting it around in her curious combination of slang and quotation and foreign idioms, all thrown in for light-hearted if serious-minded fun. If you like the voice, this is a book you’ll love, but if you don’t like it, then as Pompey herself predicts ‘Foot-on-the-ground person will have his grave grave doubts, and if he is also a smug-pug he will not keep his doubts to himself, he will say: It is not, and it cannot come to good.’

Stevie Smith is best known for her poetry, and perhaps best of all for the poem that begins:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I must say that whole tracts of my life would have to pass by unarticulated if I hadn’t had the phrase ‘not waving but drowning’ to hand. This is Stevie Smith’s particular talent, the throwaway remark that lands a hefty punch, a casual joke that reveals something peculiarly profound. Her poems, like her prose, are often superficially artless, catchy as a music hall lyric, bound up with a strange chameleon grace that bends them in and out of different speaking voices. Her life was notably identical to Pompey Casmilus’s – she lived a maiden’s existence with her aunt, having lost her parents early, she was private secretary to two magazine publishers for twenty years, and she had many friends whom she loved dearly and satirized shamelessly. Late on in life she discovered a talent for live poetry reading, where her girlish, charming and expert performances always won over her audience. According to critic Ian Hamilton ‘To hear them chuckling over her cute spiritual despairs was a fine bonus for her old age, and she took particular pleasure in upstaging the beatniks at the avant-garde poetry rallies she for some reason kept getting invited to throughout the 1960s.’ There was enough that was genuine and startling about Smith’s work to hook her reader, but there was a fine, laughing, ludic quality to her writing too, that faced up to hardship and sorrow but never quite took them seriously.

I really loved this book, although I didn’t always understand it, or follow Pompey’s rollercoaster of thought with sympathy. But she sounded so like my students when they are off on a riff, naïve and knowing, erudite and yet childish. I couldn’t help but laugh at her silly slang and her razor sharp perceptions. I’ll tell you who else she reminded me of, and that’s Gertrude Stein. The singing phrases and contorted yet rhythmic repetitions were so like Stein’s translations of the spoken voice into prose. But Stevie Smith’s preoccupations are far more metaphysical than Stein’s, her voice more lyric and whimsical. By the end of the novel, I felt the key to it was the ‘rhythm of visiting’ that is so precious to Pompey that it prevents her from marrying.

‘I have traveled and come and gone a great deal. I am toute entière visitor. That is what I am being all the time. […] That is the very highest pleasure to me, that it is a visit that comes to an end, that may recur, that may again come to an end and be renewed. The rhythm of visiting is in my blood.’

Inside Pompey’s mind and, therefore, on the yellow pages of her novel, there is nothing but endless visiting, as thoughts and memories arise and go away, some abandoned the moment they get too boring for Pompey to care, some cherished and waved off with regret. No topic may dominate, no emotion or mood may reign supreme. Instead, all is transience and charm and serious distraction. Just like the moment when Pompey’s grief about Nazi Germany is immediately and wholly replaced with book lust when she spots her sleepy train companion abandoning his copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We are all waving and drowning, waving and drowning, on an endless loop, Stevie Smith suggests, and if we can permit ourselves to grow accustomed to it, that very ambivalence may be our saving grace.

And the winner is ...

Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith. We will discuss the book beginning on January 31st. I hope you enjoy it!

Time to choose again!

It's my turn to choose a book for the Slaves of Golconda readng group. As I was thinking about what to put on the list of choices, I remembered reading about a course called "Transatlantic Women Modernists" that Fernham is teaching and finding myself jotting down a bunch of books to add to my TBR list. So I thought perhaps others would find the list interesting too. My choices are drawn from that syllabus or this list.

So please vote on which book you would like to read by Friday, November 20th, and I'll tally the results. I thought it might make sense to delay our discussion until the end of January, instead of the end of December, so the discussion will begin on Sunday, January 31st.

1. Nella Larson's Passing. From Amazon: "The tale is simple on the surface--a few adventures in Chicago and New York's high life, with lots of real people and race-mixing events described ... But underneath, it seethes with rage, guilt, sex, and complex deceptions. Irene fears losing her black husband to Clare, who seems increasingly predatory. Or is this all in Irene's mind? And is everyone wearing a mask? Larsen's book is a scary hall of mirrors, a murder mystery that can't resolve itself. It sticks with you."
2. Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper. From Wikipedia: "Stevie Smith's first novel is structured as the random typings of a bored secretary, Pompey. She plays word games, retells stories from classical and popular culture, remembers events from her childhood, gossips about her friends and describes her family, particularly her beloved Aunt."
3. Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion. From Amazon: "Jessie Redmon Fauset's first novel shows a prescient awareness of the black middle class's quest for social equality in the early twentieth century and of the limited vocational choices confronting both black and white American women in that era. Set in Philadelphia some 60 years ago, There Is Confusion traces the lives of Joanna Mitchell and Peter Bye, whose families must come to terms with an inheritance of prejudice and discrimination as they struggle for legitimacy and respect."
4. Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show. Here's the beginning of Amazon's description: "Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848."

I hope something here strikes your interest! Everyone is welcome to join us. Leave your email in the comments if you would like to join the group.

Hauntings

On Halloween, it’s interesting to wonder what exactly it is that makes things scary. The Slaves of Golconda have read The Woman in Black this month and it is a classic ghost story that combines all the usual elements – a lonely, isolated house linked to the mainland by a causeway over marshes that flood, local villagers who refuse to speak of the place, tragedies of the past recounted in a bundle of letters, and a ghostly figure in black with a ravaged, wasted face who is out to seek evil revenge. It’s well known territory but sometimes even the most reliable of literary codes and conventions can fail. My son saw the West End production of The Woman in Black on a school trip and I asked him how it was. ‘It was good, and quite scary in parts,’ he said. ‘But there was one moment when the characters were supposed to be saving a dog from quicksand, and there were only these two actors on stage, and no real dog, so watching them trying to pull an invisible dog to safety was quite funny really.’ It’s a terrible bit in the book, one that has real dramatic tension, but I could quite see how it would take some acting skills to express the peril of a drowning dog on a London stage with no dog in sight. Fear, like pain, relies enormously on the power of the imagination to anticipate consequences. But unlike pain, which is best evoked by the instrument that will inflict it, fear needs a dose of the unknown to be effective. We have to not know what will happen next, to be radically uncertain, before fear can really take hold.

Having read so many other wonderful reviews of the book (and just click over to the site if you want to see them), I felt I should do something different and think about what it is that lies beneath the figure of the ghost in literature. The word ‘ghost’ itself originates in the German Geist, which is defined as a spirit, an inspiring principle. To be human is to have a spirit or a soul, and the difficulty of confronting our mortality often leads to the belief that what must remain after death is this very spirit. But ghosts in stories show themselves to be more than just any old human spirit, hanging around still once the party is over. Ghosts are always in limbo, and they induce anxiety or they set tasks for those still living. Literary criticism borrows the mathematical term ‘the indivisible remainder’ to talk about them – it means the bit that gets left over, the small, niggling element that remains when every other part of the equation is finished, after all the other numbers have neatly folded in on themselves and disappeared. Ghosts represent the indivisible remainder of life; problems unresolved, and emotions of fear, rage, horror, distress, that are too big for the grave to swallow them up. The neat and tidy borderline between life and death becomes blurred by the appearance of the ghost, as does the boundary between what is real and what is fantastic. They are there to trouble what ought to be most certain to human life by suggesting that something will always elude cooption into the clear-cut or the fenced-in. It’s one reason why ghost stories so often begin with a scene of exquisite comfort – roaring fires, a happy, assembled company, houses locked up tight against the winter chill. Even, maybe especially, in the most secure environment, fear and horror and grief can find its way in, seeping through the cracks and chinks in the best domestic armour.

But the appearance of the ghost is not always understood as an intrusive threat to mental and emotional serenity. The experience of being haunted is usually described as being indistinguishable from the experience of mental anguish, and associated with melancholia, alienation and anxiety. (Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black has to be on his own, in the dark and cold, cut off from the possibility of rescue and invaded by a sense of despair for the black fear to really descend on him). But this is often only as an imperative to action. Many ghosts come to awaken an ethical imperative in the haunted, to ensure justice for the future as well as appeasement for the past. Whatever has been left undone, whatever cannot be subsumed into family or social history, becomes the burden of the next generation. The Gothic genre is particularly keen on this ambivalence between horror and justice. The vindictive, chain-rattling ghosts of its tales haunt family homes in order to indicate the presence of a terrible secret, usually one that threatens the legitimate transfer of an inheritance. If there’s one thing the Victorians were really afraid of, it’s that the family bloodline would be corrupted, the money diverted and the house passed on to the undeserving.

So most ghost stories, of whatever kind, press for resolution and closure. For uncovering secrets, healing old wounds and tidying up the essential human boundaries. And they derive their fear factor from the great nebulous unknown that surrounds human anguish and the unexplained pull of the past. What we don’t know DOES hurt us, often in surprising ways.

the woman in black by susan hill

Malevolence. Something grand about the word, and the way it flows off the tongue. I think of Maleficent in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, the evil fairy who seeks to take the life of Princess Aurora on her sixteenth birthday in vengeance for not being invited to a party. Yes, a little over the top but that is the appeal. A villain who is powerful beyond the constraints of mere mortal existence, who has an appeal outside of the conventionally acceptable. Someone who indulges our desire for the fun of a good fright at a removed and safe distance from actual peril. The word malevolence is on my mind today not just because of Halloween, but because I just finished Susan Hill's classic ghost story, The Woman in Black, a book where the word malevolence serves as a literal refrain in the prose.

The Woman in Black is a quick and compelling ghost story that should be read in one sitting if at all possible. The book begins in the safety and happiness of a family at Christmas sharing ghost stories beneath the lit Christmas tree. However, the father in this family refuses to offer a story, not seeing the fun in such an exchange. It is soon revealed that he has real ghosts to exorcise from his past. He vows to do just this by writing the entire story down rather than burdening his family with these disturbing truths from his youth.

As a young solicitor, Arthur Kipps is given the task of visiting the remote Eel Marsh House to attend the funeral of a longtime firm client and settle her estate. At the funeral, he glimpses a woman he assumes to be a fellow mourner, but is set ill at ease by her sickly appearance and the dated clothes she wears. He feels compassion for her but does not yet suspect the reality of her presence. He feels a mild sense of foreboding as the town's people refuse to discuss the house or the circumstances that bring him to Crythin Gifford. The next day, after he is left at the remotely located house of the deceased client, he begins to realize the eeriness of his present circumstances when he spies the woman in black again, this time on the estate's old burial grounds.

"In the greyness of the fading light, it had the sheen and pallor not of flesh so much as of bone itself. Earlier, when I had looked at her, although admittedly it had been scarcely more than a swift glance each time, I had not noticed any particular expression on her ravaged face, but then I had, after all, been entirely taken with the look of extreme illness. Now, however, as I stared at her, stared until my eyes ached in the sockets, stared in surprise and bewilderment at her presence, now I saw that her face did wear an expression. It was one of what I can only describe - and the words seem hopelessly inadequate to express what I saw - as a desperate, yearning malevolence; it was as though she were searching for something she wanted, needed -must have, more than life itself, and which had been taken from her. And, towards whoever had taken it she directed the purest evil and hatred and loathing, with all the force that was available to her."

I will stop there as who really wants spoilers with a story like this? The Woman in Black is not the best book I have ever read, but it is really good fun. The story is well-delivered in a manner that lightly mirrors both the language and the ghost-telling conventions of the time in which it was set. Hill does a wonderful job with the atmospherics (you will feel the threat of the very specifically described personified and menacing fog), and, if read at one sitting, you will feel the dread than terror of the protagonist yourself. Yes, you may see the ending coming 40 pages before it actually arrives. Yes, you may be frustrated at the young solicitor's stubborn determination to return and sleep over at the house he senses contains some undetermined evil. But that is all part of the fun isn't it? Happy Halloween!

The Woman in Black

I’ll admit I’m a newbie when it comes to ghost stories. I’ve read some, I’m sure, but it was a long, long time ago, and I don’t remember any details. So I don’t have much of a basis of comparison to work with here. What this book taught me, though, is that the circumstances in which one reads a ghost story matter a lot. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is only 150 pages long and probably should be read in as close to one sitting as possible. When I had the chance to sit down with this book for more than a few minutes at a time, I got caught up in the atmosphere and enjoyed myself. When I read only small pieces of it before putting it down again to go on to something else, I became too distanced from the story to feel much of the spookiness and suspense.

I did enjoy the illustrations in my edition of the book (the one pictured above); the black and white sketches helped create a sense of what the almost other-worldly landscape must have looked like. I enjoyed the atmosphere the book created more than the story itself; the story is fairly simple and straightforward and not so difficult to figure out, even for someone like me who is generally very bad at figuring things out. But Hill does atmosphere very well, and I liked the descriptions of the town where the people obviously have deep, dark secrets; the house separated from the town by a causeway that is under water when the tide is in; the absolutely unforthcoming driver who carries the main character back and forth; and the terrifyingly shifty and treacherous quicksand reminiscent of the shivering sands in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

The story is told by an older man, Arthur Kipps, who is surrounded by his happy family but haunted by memories. He decides to write his story down to try to make his ghostly memories disappear once and for all. The story he has to tell takes place when he was much younger, an innocent and confident young man, eager to make his way in the world. He receives an assignment to sort through the papers of a woman who has recently died, a Mrs. Drablow who lives on the coast and who, he discovers, no one in the town wants to discuss. While at Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Arthur sees a woman who has seemingly come out of nowhere and who suffers from a some kind of a wasting disease. He asks about her later, but it turns out no one else has seen her, and no one will answer his questions about her. He brushes this aside and continues on with his work, but, of course, this is not the last he sees of the mysterious woman.

And then we are plunged into a familiar dynamic: Arthur knows he is getting himself into a very strange, very creepy situation, and the more time he spends at Mrs. Drablow’s house the more this feeling is confirmed, but he is determined to do his work well, no matter what the consequences. Why should he let a ghostly woman dressed in black keep him from completing his task? Why should he be afraid of spending the night in Mrs. Drablow’s house, even when he knows it is haunted?

Well, he learns why. I liked the fact that — and now I will get to some spoilers — the plot revolves around a mother who is forced to give up her child born out of wedlock. To separate a mother and child is to violate the natural order to such a horrific extent that a terrible revenge is sure to follow. Hill makes clear that the fate of women who have made “mistakes” in love may vary, but it is never good:

A girl from the servant class, living in a closely-bound community, might perhaps have fared better, sixty or so years before, than this daughter of genteel parentage, who had been so coldly rejected and whose feelings were so totally left out of the count. Yet servant girls in Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children. At least Jennet had known that her son was alive and had been given a good home.

The community has a whole has had to pay a high price for this cruelty. Individual families might perpetrate the wrong on an immediate level, but it is a cultural sin and the culture pays.

On a lighter level, I also liked the role the dog Spider played. Spider was probably the character I cared about most, in fact. The scene where she almost gets lost in the quicksand is the most harrowing one in the book. One of the most frightening things I can think of is a dog who is thoroughly freaked out and frightened for reasons we can’t understand. Surely that dog knows something we don’t?

I didn’t think this was a great book, but I thought it was a competent one, and it makes me a little more curious than I was before about other ghost stories and about what else Susan Hill has written.

If you would like to read more posts on the book, check out the Slaves of Golconda blog and the discussion forums. I hope to see you there!

Curious

I had high expectations for The Woman in Black by Susan Hill because it seems so many blogging book people loved it. Well, I must say I was disappointed. There were three things that combined to make me not care for the book:

1. There is so much foreshadowing and foreboding for the first half of the book without anything happening that I began to wonder how the actuality could meet the build up. I grew skeptical instead of anticipatory and the more hints of doom that were tossed out the more I doubted so that something really spectacular was going to have to happen in order for things to turn around for me. When the woman in black finally made an appearance my response was, that’s it? I tried to rescue it by thinking how I would feel if I saw something unexplainable like that, but I just couldn’t manage it.



2. It also didn’t help that as soon as Arthur began reading Jennet’s letters I figured everything out except for one or two minor details. Thus any kind of surprise that could have been had in later revelations was nonexistent.



3. I could not shake the feeling that I had read this book before even though I am 99% sure I have not. Nor have I seen the movie. This distracted me throughout the book because part of my brain was off trying to figure out why the book was so darn familiar.

So let’s leave my dislike of it behind and look instead on an essential feature of all scary stories: curiosity. There was plenty of curiosity on display in Arthur, our intrepid narrator. If he hadn’t been curious about why everyone was so tightlipped about the Drablow estate he had come to deal with there would not have been a story. And what about the noises coming from the locked room? If he wasn't curious we'd never know what was in there and the story would end. All horror stories need someone who is curious in order to move the plot ahead.

The curious, it seems to me, are generally the ones who are innocent, ignorant, or just plain stupid. In Arthur's case it was a combination of innocence and ignorance. The townspeople of Crythin Gifford were neither ignorant nor innocent because the town had been so affected by what happened at the Drablow house. It therefore took an outsider to tell the story.

You and I sitting and reading (or watching a movie) in a safe and cozy place have it easy. We can call the character who dares walk into the haunted room crazy because we have the luxury of the events not happening to us. But guaranteed, as much as we may protest and say "I'd never go in that room," if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation we very likely would find our curiosity overbalancing our fear. Because that's the thing about people, we may be utterly terrified but at the same time we want to know what is behind that door or out in the fog. Our curiosity gets the best of us. That and, perhaps, a bit of disbelief or skepticism regarding what is happening. It could not be real. Could it? Even Arthur questions if the things he saw and heard were "real" and that leads him to doubt reality altogether. Once we begin to doubt reality we are done for.

I may not have enjoyed the story of The Woman in Black but it did get me thinking a little on what makes scary work or not work. So in that sense, the book isn't a complete loss.

Cross posted at So Many Books

The Woman in Black - Susan Hill

The stage adaptation of ‘The Woman in Black’ is probably one of the scariest things I’ve ever been to see. Screams came from the stalls whenever the woman in black appeared on stage. During the final scene in the haunted house, there was an inward hiss of breath, as the people sitting close to the stage tried to brace themselves for the appearance of the woman in black, who would surely violently attack Arthur Kipps as he surveyed the devastated nursery. But she never appeared, Arthur creeps around the room in silence, then flees the house and somehow that was more terrifying than anything else that has happened during the performance. Our tension was denied a release and we all kept our guard up until the end of the performance, which just meant that our nerves were more easily tweaked by the shocking finale.

This restraint and simplicity is exactly what makes the original novel so terrifying. Simple, everyday sounds and sights are perverted by the malevolent ghost who haunts the house Arthur is sent to, after his solicitor’s firm is told that a client of theirs has died. A row of small children, the sound of a pony and trap, a noise from Arthur’s childhood, all these things take on sinister associations as the mysterious lady in black uses them to show Arthur her power. These are tiny things, by themselves, but as they are repeated throughout the novel the reader learns to equate them with fear and evil, filling them with a horrifying significance and potency.

The images and sounds that Hill chooses to repeat, in order to create this building effect of horror are sparse and simple, for example the clip clop of a pony’s hooves is a crisp, ringing sound. It’s hard to describe why this particular simplicity of sound or image conjures such fear, without unpicking the years of cultural baggage that each reader loads them with, but my best attempt would be that they are pared back to the absolute core of a sound, or image and that the pure, undecorated reality of them strikes the emotional nucleus of the reader. Arthur’s narrative, which is generally full of energetic delight in nature and the surrounding landscapes, is descriptive, but sharply so, conjuring exact images that are easy to visualize, for example ‘I saw a blackbird on a hollybush a few feet away and heard him open his mouth to pour out a sparkling fountain of song in the November sunlight’. He also describes his observation of the ghostly apparitions with similar clear, piercing detail that does not over or under explain what he sees. This creates sobering moments of sinister simplicity, almost anxious tranquillity if that’s even possible, for example:

‘Lined up along the iron railings that surrounded the small asphalt yard of the school were twenty or so children, one to a gap. They presented a row of solemn faces with great, rounded eyes, that had watched who knew how much of the mournful proceedings, and their little hands held the railings tight, and they were all of them quite silent, quite motionless.'

This style of description, measured and methodical, but also evocative and precise forces the reader to fully absorb the details of the scene and crystallises the pictures in the reader’s mind, transmitting the full horror of a particular scene.

Can there be more great stuff in such a short book? Well yes, there’s the narrator Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor sent to the sleepy market town of Crythin Gifford, to venture across the marshes and sort through the paper’s of Mrs Drablow, his firm’s recently deceased client. At heart Arthur is an energetic, sensible man keen on nature and bicycling, with no time for dark hints and superstitious tales. Yet, more and more he feels the hypnotic quality of the landscape around Mr Drablow’s house, the ‘glittering, beckoning, silver marshes’ and the sadness that lingers in the house.

What struck me most about Arthur is that while initially he believes himself too sophisticated to be influenced by tales and strange occurrences, he is sensible enough to trust the evidence of his own senses and to know that there’s no point in being courageous around spirits. That’s something that sets him apart from the narrator of ‘The Mist in the Mirror’ (which I read a month ago) who is so stubborn and prideful that he alienates the fearful reader, who would quite happily run away from ghosts. Arthur is a hero the reader can identify with and feel proud to spend time with, even as he flees the ghostly woman.

Last night, thoroughly freaked and happy that Spider the dog has made it out alive I shoved this book between the heaviest two volumes I could find. At the start of the RIP challenge I said I wanted to be gloriously scared and ‘The Woman in Black’ has accomplished that. If I was Joey I’d be keeping this book in the freezer.

The Woman In Black

It's been a rough October. Could someone please open the discussion, and I'll jump in in a day or two. Many thanks, Slaves!

Susan Hill's Woman in Black

They had chided me with being a spoil-sport, tried to encourage me to tell them the one ghost story I must surely, like any other man, have it in me to tell. And they were right. Yes, I had a story, a true story, a story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion. But it was not a story told for casual entertainment, around a fireside upon Christmas Eve.

Susan Hill's The Woman in Black opens on Christmas Eve, a holiday when death, darkness, and the grotesque are furthest from the mind. (I'm not familiar with British Christmas rituals but telling ghosts stories seemed very odd. Maybe I'm just being Americentric?) The time of year for that stuff is October and the celebration of Halloween, which I remember one of my English professors discussing in a lecture analyzing Euripedes's The Bacchae. Many cultures, he said, have a holiday set aside as a time for release and liberation, when people can behave in ways they usually don't. (Another example would be Mardi Gras.) Christmas, by contrast, is a season for giving and politeness, when the dark or unsavory side of things comes up only as a problem to be solved through kindness and generosity. Something evil or frightening that appears in December is an intrusion, like the encroachment of the dead into the world of the living.

The Woman in Black is the story of one such a disturbance, not only between ghosts and humans, past and present, but also between fiction and reality. Arthur Kipp, who narrates the tale retroactively in old age, is a brash, young attorney who has been sent by his firm to organize the estate of the late Alice Drablow, a widow who had lived alone in Eel Marsh House, isolated out on a swampy causeway. The place is rumored to be haunted by a "woman in black," whose appearance always foretells the death of one of the town children. Kipp believes none of this, naturally. I had "the Londoner's sense of superiority in those days," he admits, further confessing to viewing the townsfolk as simple bumpkins who had unfairly demonized Mrs. Drablow.

Doubtless, in a place such as this, with its eerie marshes, sudden fogs, moaning winds and lonely houses, any poor old woman might be looked at askance; once upon a time, after all, she might have been branded as a witch and local legends and tales were still abroad and some extravagant folklore still half-believed in.

It actually sounds too good to be true: ghosts in this place? Huh, who would've guessed?

At first glance, Susan Hill seems remarkably unoriginal, but that was probably the point. The Woman in Black is a self-conscious ghost story (beginning with the title), akin to how Scream was metafictional satire. Arthur Kipps, in his attempts to understand the mystery of "the woman with the wasted face" and Eel Marsh House, constantly refers back to the fictional genre of the ghost story and, to a lesser extent, Gothic/romantic suspense. He notices, for example, how the wraithlike "woman in black" does and does not exhibit features typically associated with ghosts (she wears old-fashioned clothing but appears solid). He recognizes the abandoned graveyard and monastic ruins next to Eel Marsh House as having a clichéd Romantic ambiance and being precisely the kind of place where some Edgar Allen Poe type would enjoy sitting and composing "cloying sad verse." There is even a nod to "the madwoman in the attic," a timeworn Gothic trope used most famously in Jane Eyre.

Like Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black functions on two levels: as an entertaining story and as a play on genre. I wonder if years of ghost/Gothic/horror novels and films have severely dampened our ability to come out with a ghost/Gothic/horror story that takes itself seriously and doesn't seem too much like fiction come to life. But I think the familiar elements of the genre have true staying power, and The Woman in Black is a great example of a tale that's been told yet still has the potential to thrill and delight.

The weirdest thing happened while I was reading this book. I got it from the library and it looks like the last time it was checked out was May 19, 1992. Anyway, a perfectly preserved maple leaf just fell out from between the pages! It actually freaked me out! Wonder where it came from? Was it put there deliberately?

This Book and I Could Be Friends

Envelope, please...

And the winner is (by a hair) The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.  Happy reading.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

I've been asked to select some titles for the next Slaves of Golconda. At first I hadn't the ghost of an idea. I mean, it really was murder coming up with a theme. It was a devil of an assignment that haunted me. I think you now get the drift.

Autumn is here at last. The nights are growing cooler and soon leaves will turn their most brilliant hues - their last hurrah before...Death. Why do we love to be frightened? In what was my most recurrent nightmare, I was being chased by a frightful, demonic figure. As I tried to flee, my feet became leaden and I slogged forward knowing that right behind me breathed a beast. I was always just outside his reach. And then one night I discovered that I could run as fast as the wind with one...big...catch. I had to turn around and run backwards, thereby forcing myself to face the creature that roared and raged, ready to devour me. The nightmare never returned after that night. I had learned to face my fear, and by facing it I had defeated it. Perhaps that is why stories of mystery and suspense, of ghosties and ghoulies and monsters under the bed hold a certain goose-pimply charm for us. So, in honor of Halloween (my favorite holiday) I thought a little mystery, murder, mayhem or "things that go bump in the night" might be in order. Follow me....if...you...dare!

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THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD by Agatha Christie

First published in 1926, and considered to be one of Christie's most controversial mysteries, the Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks all the rules of traditional mystery writing. A widow's suicide has stirred rumors of blackmail, and of a secret lover named Roger Ackroyd, who was found stabbed to death in his study. The case is so unconventional that not even renowned detective Hercule Poirot has a clue how to solve it. For many Agatha Christie fans, this was her masterpiece.

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THE MALTESE FALCON by Dasheill Hammett

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel - one of the best ever written. It is also a brilliant literary work, as well as a thriller, a love story, and a dark, dry comedy.

It involves a treasure worth killing for, Sam Spade - a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, a perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammet's coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers. (from Google books).

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THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Published in 1886, this is one of the best known of Stevenson's novels. It concerns the way in which an individual is made up of contrary emotions and desires: some good and some evil. Through the curiousity of Utterson, a lawyer, we learn of the ugly and violent Mr. Hyde and his odd connection to the respectable Dr. Jekyll. A brutal murder is committed. The victim is one of Utterson's clients, and the murder weapon a cane which Utterson had given to Dr. Jeykill. And so, the lawyer becomes entangled in the strange world of the physician who has created a drug that separates the good in human nature from the evil - and the despicable Mr. Hyde.

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THE WOMAN IN BLACK by Susan Hill

Set on the English moor, on an isolated cause-way, at a mansion in the bleak, flat wetlands - with no neighbors in sight, the story stars an up-and-coming young solicitor who sets out to settle the estate of Mrs. Drablow. Routine affiars quickly give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister than any nightmare.

Often compared to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the book starts peacefully and builds to a frightening crescendo that, according to one reviewer on Amazon, "will haunt" you."

Are you game to take a sojourn (perhaps foolishly) into Eel Marsh House? What awaits you there? If you do, will you ever be the same? (I'm getting all spine-tingly just thinking about it.)

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Happy Halloween! Oh, I haven't learned how to link yet - but you can always Google.  Shall we try for October 29th to begin the discussion rather than Halloween?  After all, we might want to dabble in spirits of another sort on the 31st!!

Small Town Dreaming

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'It was amazing about girls, how lofty and complacent they became when they got out in public with a man – any man – while a fellow shrank and felt ridiculous and prayed for the ordeal to end. It was amazing about women anyway, Grace over there, snickering behind her hand and Jen, stony-faced, remote, and Nettie, bending over his knes to pick up a handkerchief, fussing around in her seat, brushing her ankles against his and then hastily drawing them back, pressing her plump arms against him, then moving primly away.... God, how he hated the whole lot of them, Morry thought, the way they knew how to make a man squirm from old Mrs Delaney on down to the littlest girl. It was their function in life, making men feel clumsy and stupid, that was all they ever wanted to accomplish....'

Dawn Powell's novel, Dance Night, is concerned with various forms of rancour. Set in Ohio, in a small town sprung up around the dominant factory, it assembles a cast of naturally disadvantaged folk, adolescents, orphans, neglected wives, desperate young women and a whole lot of men who are obliged to live with the death or gradual decline of their ambitions. Everyone would get out if they could, if they had the money, or the education or the courage to do so. The railway bisects the town and the continuous thunder of the carriages is a temptation and a taunt that ultimately dies away into distant dreams. And so the inhabitants of Lamptown carry on with their diminished hopes and unruly desires, trying to squeeze what life they can out of small town claustrophobia. Smoking, drinking and doomed relationships take centre stage, with all excitement focused on the Thursday nights at the casino, where the dance master, Mr Fischer, offers classes and acts as master of ceremonies.

This is fundamentally the story of Morry Abbot, the most awkward, ungainly and emotionally disadvantaged of them all. He's a young man from a dysfunctional family in a novel that doesn't know of any other kind. His mother, the milliner of the Bon Ton hat shop, he loves, and Elsinore, in her absent, empty way is fond of him, too. But her hands-off care is no counterbalance to his father's ugly scorn. Charles Abbot is no good, a travelling salesman with a woman in every town, he returns to his family ever few months to exercise his demonic power over them. He sends a message in advance 'The Candy Man will visit you', as a threat rather than a promise. Elsinore loathes her husband and has fallen into a deep and all-consuming fantasy about Mr Fischer that keeps her locked inside her own head for most of the time. Nettie is the vicious young woman who also works in the store, and who acts like the worst kind of younger sibling to Morry, telling tales on him, ruthlessly pointing out his faults, demanding his punishment from his parents. Small wonder, then, that Morry wants out. He has a head full of romantic ambitions about becoming rich and famous and a disquieting yet compelling relationship with the young orphan girl, Jen St. Clair, who lives over the way. He's attracted to Jen because of her native courage and determination. And the worshipful audience she pays him makes him believe that one day he might amount to something.

If there's a dominant theme of the novel it's the quest for love in a strata of society depicted as being emotionally crippled. It begs the question of whether love is directly influenced by freedom, optimism, hope, potential. In the absence of these things, when self-love isn't a viable goal for many of the novel's inhabitants, love becomes something else altogether; competitiveness, lust, the engagement of fascinated hatred. There's a curious quirk that emerges time and again in Powell's characters, whose behaviour becomes a negative blueprint for the thing they think they want. In this way the extravagance of Morry's dreams match the intolerable constraint he suffers under, just as Nettie's endless carping is an expression of her desire for Morry, and Elsinore's fantasies about Fischer are there to balance out her horror of her husband. The drive for life repeatedly implodes in the protagonists of Dance Night, mutating into some dark, twisted alternative.

Whilst this may sound a sad or unappealing tale, it isn't like that at all. Powell writes exquisitely, and the ruinous landscape of Lamptown is transformed in her hands into constant action and vitality and a rich, evocative sensuality. Those nights at the dance hall are glittering jewels strung across the narrative, with the taut thrum of desire acting as the wire that holds them together. The novel shows how even under the most reduced circumstances, people find ways to thrive and to flourish, how even prisons of the soul provide security and stability and dependable company. And besides, if the inhabitants of Lamptown were free to act as they wish, they wouldn't have their dreams; if there's one thing this story insists upon, it's the power of dreams to keep us motivated, patient and hopeful.

I very much enjoyed this book, but was intrigued to find, yet again, another episodic narrative. Not a great deal happens in the novel, even though there's a death, several couplings and friendships broken and made. It's strange, the sensation of stasis that dominates, but perhaps it's a consequence of Lamptown being itself the most important character in the story. Lamptown may grow and even become prosperous, but there's no sense that it will change or develop; it won't be anything more than a one dimensional working class town that invites its inhabitants to dream and desire, to graft and to wish, and to never grow up. I was going to write a whole lot more about episodic narratives, as I've been thinking about this a lot, but I've run out of space here. So I'll devote the next post to it. In any case, I'll be seeking out more of Dawn Powell's work. Apparently her later novels are satires, and I can imagine her darkly amused voice working well in that context. Thanks to the Slaves (where you'll find several more reviews of this novel) for bringing another fine author to my attention.