Sorworth Place by Russell Kirk

 

SORWORTH PLACE by Russell Kirk

“She carried herself with a dignity that seems to be dying from modern life, looking straight ahead, as if in some reverie that walled her away from the grossness of Sorworth —“

Dying from modern life, indeed. And this woman, with the Widow Syndrome from the previous Aickman Fontana books I reviewed, is young to be a widow at all. The male protagonist Bain has the pain or bane of a crack in the skull from the erstwhile war’s mortar, and enforced celibacy, and he wanders and stays at chance out-of-the-way places amid the kirks of Scotland, using his meagre pension, awaiting for fate to use him as it will, including here in the well-characterised downbeat ex-colliery Sorworth. He glimpsed this young widow and fatefully gets to know her, not love-making but “…talking of books and queer corners and the small things of nature”, both of them considered ‘odd’ if not even, as if two halves of an impossible whole, and he regularly visits her in the equally well-characterised large, bleak house that she has inherited from her dead husband, and, amid the building’s darksome mazes, Bain protects her from the latter’s anniversary return as a vengeful ghost, although he is a ghost subject to the constraints of matter. The eventual (mutually destructive?) synergy of man and ghost creates a rooftop battle between them and such eventual oddities become fell cracks in the wholeness of fate itself. Fallen from a building unprettified by Balmoralization.

“…the only realities in an infinity of shadows.” 

The full explicatory Robert Aickman context of above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/12/27614/