I’ve always had a predilection for creepy tales. As a child, I remember listening to scary stories told to me by my grandmother, such as the tale of the Mistletoe Bride, watching Alfred Hitchcock movies on the Golden Years of Hollywood on a Saturday night, and reading the atmospheric Reb
ecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
Later, I ended up doing an English subject at university on gothic fiction!
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood caught my eye in a bookshop recently as it looked suitably dark and creepy. The story is told from the viewpoint of Gerard Freeman and takes place in the 20th century . Gerard finds a secret drawer in his mother’s room containing a photograph and a long-forgotten ghost story written by his great-grandmother, Viola Hatherley, in the 1890s.
What follows is Gerard’s quest to discover the truth about his family and uncover the mystery that his mother seems so reluctant to talk about. Along with Gerard’s framing first-person narrative are numerous letters, several ghost stories by Viola, newspaper articles and legal documents - all adding layer-upon-layer to the story.
For me, the strongest parts of the novel were Viola’s creepy Victorian ghost stories. One in particular, ‘The Gift of Flight’ taking place in the British Library, was genuinely scary and suspenseful.
Julia held her breath, listening. The rustling came closer, and ceased; the swirling wall of fog remained utterly opaque, then she heard the faint scrape of a chair – it sounded like the chair immediately to her left – being drawn out, followed by the almost inaudible creak of the seat as someone, or something, settled themselves upon it.
Gerard’s narrative, on the other hand could have offered more. I would have liked more characterisation, particularly of his mother and father who aren’t much more than cardboard cut-outs. This would have nicely balanced out the more documentary, story-within-story elements of the tale.
That said, I enjoyed The Ghost Writer, I haven’t read many other contemporary novels that echo the satisfying creepiness of Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ or a story by Du Maurier. But perhaps I just haven’t discovered them yet …
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April 16, 2007 at 10:46 pm
[...] atmosphere that pervades her writing (as I’ve mentioned previously I have a weakness for the gothic in literature and film). In the article Kate Kellaway theorises that: Du Maurier was mistress of [...]