My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below..
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
THE TOWER by Marghanita Laski.
When I watched and listened to her as a media panellist during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, I had no idea she had written or would write one of the greatest horror stories ever. This lonely tower of 470 steps near Florence, is worth climbing alongside Caroline — exercising her personal rights on a day when her husband Neville (Marghanita’s father was called Neville) had released her by dint of his business commitments elsewhere that day when they were both touring Italy — and as she climbs its internal precarious spirals in the dusk, we realise it is a self-enforced task on her part to prove herself if only towards severe psychological vertigo, with the terrifying prospect of anxious descent. With the tower’s backstory, no wonder!
And the story’s ending holds an unaccountable threat….
The reader is within their own such tower, from birth up into life and then back down toward death, from brain toward bottom?
THE SHADOWY THIRD (1916) by Ellen Glasgow
“Was it his fault if he could see only half of the thing before him?”
An imposing god-like impression of a surgeon by whom all women were infatuated, it seemed! Including the young nurse he particularly employs in his large house as our witness narrative night nurse, to look after his wife (a rich widow) with a mental illness that turns out to feature her dead daughter from the previous marriage playing as a hallucination that our narrator shares as a reality. With a recurrence of daffodils and a supernatural retribution eventually by this small ghost’s skipping rope for the supposed evil gaslighting and monetary machinations by the surgeon. I shall remember seeing the small girl playing in the house and in its garden through the stylish eyes of our collusive narrator for a long while… (I know whom I believe.)
Love the Bowenesque title, too, of course. But who was the third of what whole?
The Diary of Mr. Poynter by M.R. James
“Mr. Denton stamped on the floor (where else, indeed, could he have stamped?)”
After his house burnt down, James Denton, seeking replacement furnishings for the new build upon its site, forgot his Aunt’s ‘Chintzes’. She is the only other member of his household and she is annoyed when finding out he had bought more books instead! The dusty Poynter diary volumes being the case in point. But when she randomly finds, with initial disgust, an earwig bookmarking one of them, she was then fascinated by the fabric sample thus found within, and a pattern the description of which I shall allow you to read fully for yourself in context, including the vertical lines and, when persuaded to have this fabric pattern and similar materials turned into new curtains for the new house, what frighteningly happened when vertical lines impossibly join up (“There was an effect as if some one kept peeping out… […] ‘as if the man scented something almost Hevil in the design.’”)
Unique curtains to boast about (“What’s every man’s, it’s been said, is no man’s.”)
And the eventual climactic haunting (which I shall also leave you to read including something about a coffin) is triggered by its own description here and later contextualised by what is written between two stuck pages in the Poynter diary volume.
A Poynter as bookmark and a Peeper? There is a character in this story who is said to always quote Shakespeare at the drop of a hat. And so now, I feel it’s my turn to do so…
Comb down his hair; look, look! it stands upright. How one can thus peep through hair? And does an earwig have hair? Although the Shakespeare line directly preceding the above line in its context talks of having no eyes at all! Mr ‘Iggins, ‘Ercules, ‘ope, ‘appened, Hevil, in this story.
… coffin on ‘air?
My previous reviews of M.R. James: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/my-ongoing-reviews-of-m-r-james-stories/
ROOUM by Oliver Onions
“Somewhere or other he’d picked up the word ‘osmosis’, and seemed to have some glimmering of its meaning. He dropped the molecules, and began to ask me about osmosis.”
I look at words with a sense of pareidolia, like the Vs and As in the wallpaper where the narrator stays with Rooum. And as you can see, I, too, had a ‘glimmering of the meaning’ of ‘OsmOsis’ when recently reviewing OO’s TRAGIC CASEMENTS (HERE) and, synchronously also in that review, about a filter working both ways! A rum do of a review, with OO’s liquid through immurements, solids through solids, faces through casement panes, ROOUM a perfect name for the man whatever his sleight or slur of Aickman’s later gluey Zeno’s Paradox-type races, as well as the race in the face of Rooum from cloudy, greeny white to black and back again — re that filter, again…
“‘It means, doesn’t it,’ he demanded, ‘that liquids will work their way into one another – through a bladder or something? Say a thick fluid and a thin: you’ll find some of the thick in the thin, and the thin in the thick?’”
“‘What do you want to know that for?’ I said. ‘What does a chap like you, who can do it all backwards, want with molecules?’”
“…the engineers who are the architects nowadays. The chaps who think they’re the architects are only a sort of paperhangers, who hang brick and terra-cotta on our work…”
For engineers there please read leasehold readers and reviewers, for architects please read the freehold authors themselves? —
This story fills me with sublime awe again, after all the years from when I first read it. It is the essence of what I am seeking in stories. It is the rummest do of all. Rooum who is an instinctive man, and he has a gift for the art of materials-handling, especially in jobs of labouring, the skill of water-finding or what I call divining, dowsing, dreamcatching, yes, hawling! — Rooum, with a fear of echoes, and of someone running after him, and that someone then passing by him to go ahead, perhaps by passing throughhim rather than by-passing him, all this leading to a classic Hitchcockian climax where a crane races along girders in a cinematic set piece you will surely not forget. Till we reach the elbow trigger that clinches Rooum’s fate… “He threw up one elbow, and staggered to his feet as I made another clutch at him.” I think it would be, of course.
“We were walking in the direction of Lewisham (I think it would be),…”
My other reviews of Oliver Onions variously linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/22/the-rope-in-the-rafters-1935-by-oliver-onions/
THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE by May Sinclair
Reviewed by me in 2009: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/192/
NIGHT-FEARS by L.P. Hartley
“Now he scarcely noticed its blankness. His thoughts were few but pleasant to dwell on, and in the solitude they had the intensity of sensations. He arranged them in cycles, the rotation coming at the end of ten paces or so when he turned to go back over his tracks. He enjoyed the thought that held his mind for the moment,…”
A short but thoughtful anecdote as an atmospheric and theatrical theme-and-variations on LPH’s ‘The Thought’. A nightwatchman with his brazier who is looking after an area marked by seemingly random poles. An anxious soliloquy about his wife and how he sometimes pulled the wool over her eyes about the exciting stories he told about being a nightwatchman in wartime and now turned on its head as to what she might be doing while he is doing this job — or a dream of meeting a stranger or, indeed, an actual meeting with a stranger as a confession / fulfilment of fears while his friend the coke brazier runs out of coke. His own stream of thought halted by a change in point of view of narrative omniscience towards possible lethal consequence.
I noted, as random areas of my own thought, the red hankie around his neck that once served to carry his supper and the thiught of air-raid blinds being used to wrap parcels as an aid to his thrift for wife and kids…
“As the stranger took no notice, but continued to sit wrapped in thought,…”
My other reviews of LPH variously linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/03/other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/
BEWITCHED by Edith Wharton
Reviewed by me in 2016 here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/the-ghost-stories-of-edith-wharton/
BLIND MAN’S BUFF by H. Russell Wakefield
“…a little narrow passage.”
The story of Mr Cort getting lost getting there, and getting lost again inside once there, later than he hoped, with night drawing in! The solitary Manor he tentatively planned to buy, outside sown with eyes like windows staring at him, once inside, seemingly without a match to strike and somehow no other means for lighting, the entrance door playing hide and seek behind him in the dark, and at every turn a recurrent narrow passage…. and Mr Runt whose own later recurrent narrow incantation was that “None of us chaps goes to Manor after sundown.” Why not THE Manor, Mr Runt? And was Cort caught by some deadly torque’s seizure in one of the heart’s own narrow passages — or simply a funny Turn and Turn About? A party game without windows-for-the-soul that some call eyes.
My other reviews of HRW here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/14/look-up-there-by-h-russell-wakefield/
THE CHEERY SOUL by Elizabeth Bowen
“There was no holly, and no pieces of string.”
But this Christmas story of fir cones thrown upon extinct fires has at least made ME into a cheery soul, beyond even the cheeriness (not) of Miss Fox and the house to which she was invited in the previous story I kindly reviewed for you! This re-reading of The Cheery Soul has reminded me of the wonderful synergy in it, another synergy with the Aickman style of absurdism, although I suspect that it is Aickman who shares a retro-conduit of synergy with an originating form of Bowenesque absurdist fiction. Well, you must all already know the plot of this surely classic work. How could you not? A man’s hope for a cheery Christmas when he would otherwise be alone for Christmas in a blackouted and rationed Britain, this hope engendered when he was invited to a house near a Midlands canal (Aickman again!), indeed, surprisingly invited by an otherwise reputed,y inhospitable threesome-as-one who have also been reputed to be in “a ferment of war production” as humourless do-gooders. There, in this house, he finds this threesome’s aunt, a mishandled refugee from Italy, and evidence of a missing cook having left empty ovens and a rude note in a fish kettle as large as an infant’s bath, and there is also a clock whose ‘loud tick was reluctant’…despite suspenseful whirrs to strike hours in the badly acoustic hall. Like the aunt from Italy, he now had no other roof to call his own, and we all know what roofs mean to Bowen as well as to Aickman! — climbing up to them together to socialise or to solve the mystery of the universe. But then a policeman arrives and the rest is story, if not history. At least there was one sprig of mistletoe left by the aggrieved cook. You know how this story ends already, I guess. All those claims of espionage and other shenanigans. So I will not ask you to to boil your heads if you demand more from me. I will simply go half way, with this my own ending of a helpful review…
“…about half way, I turned on my lamp, I watched mist curdle under its wobbling ray.”
My reviews of ALL Elizabeth Bowen fiction works here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
THE QUINCUNX by Walter de la Mare
This story is easily told, easily read, cosily creepy, and tells of a narrator invited by a friend called Walter to a house which had been inherited from an aunt recently, the death of whom perhaps created her ghost trying to prevent him from locating the riches that she owned. Turning her own portrait from facing the wall, as Walter left it before he went to bed, to facing the room again during the night! The narrator invited to sit up and thwart the ghost. It is in fact Walter as a trans version of the aunt doing it, while Walter is arguably sleepwalking, the narrator observed. Till the narrator tracks down the eponymous design on paper inside the portrait as a ‘map’ to the ‘treasure’ or, as the narrator sensed, to a secret (a word as a mutant of ‘quim’ plus a near even ruder word that may be part of the aunt’s sexual ‘secret’ with Walter’s father), yes, a secret, not a ‘treasure’, that, in the end, by usage of the fire in the candleflame that the sleepwalker or ‘ghost’ carried, the narrator chivalrously protected! This story in part at least changed ownership, as another potential secret, or at best a mutual synergy, that I now ungentlemanlily reveal — a change of ownership with L.P. Hartley in 1929: my review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/09/a-change-of-ownership-by-l-p-hartley/
My reviews of ALL WDLM stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/my-reviews-of-walter-de-la-mare-in-alphabetical-order/
THREE MILES UP by Elizabeth Jane Howard
My review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/24/three-miles-up/
RINGING THE CHANGES by Robert Aickman
Although I myself live on the east coast out of Liverpool Street, I’ve never visited Holihaven, as the name often assonates and resonates too much with Halloween and honeymoon for me. And I read this terrifying story first in the 1960s, just when I moved away from the east coast. I have returned since in more recent years, though. And keep my ears open for the bells of distant Dunwich, while having finally found my own sea here. The sea that is so elusive in Holihaven and its quay.
I often recall the honeymoon of Gerald in Holihaven with his wife Phrynne, twenty plus years younger than him. A train journey there slower because it was flatter. Neither had been there before and when they arrived early in the evening it seemed deserted even for October. With echoing bells practising, they are told — enough bells for two churches. They have booked at the lodging house run by the Mr and Mrs Pascoe: the husband with a great gob of spit and a bad stomach, and the wife belittled by him for breaking a whole bottle of brandy. Phrynne thinks men wear too many clothes. And there is a regular at the lodging house, a Commandant who stares at the “toppling citadels in the fire” around which they sit in the coffee room, or was it the lounge? He tells them the bells are ringing to wake the dead on this very day the honeymooners have chosen to arrive in Holihaven, and Phrynne gets an “unusual devil” inside.
A suit of Japanese armour outside the Commandant’s room, the Commandant whose sword was once broken in half, we are tellingly told. He, though, tells the honeymooners to leave Holihaven straightaway for fear of what might happen to them on this special night. What’s the difference between ‘ecstatic’ and ‘agonised’, I ask. The peals swell and diminish. Phrynne becomes part of it all — and I need not tell you what that ‘all’ actually is, as we all already know this famous story — but there’s something sexually aberrant as well as morbidly so. Mrs Pascoe stares at Phrynne’s revealed pretty body with animosity. And it is as if recent events in our own times, with that Wembley football match the other night, reflected in this ‘all’, one of the swaying lumpy wraiths waving his arms “like a negro”. Others ‘were agitators bawling a slogan, or massed trouble-makers at a football match.” Dancing, whirling, bursting their lungs. Pandemicised lungs, I say.
No wonder in the aftermath, the milkman in Wrack Street had the name of another town on his cart. And, as you can see above, at least one of the peals was a peel…
“Then passion began to open its petals within him, layer upon slow layer.”
All my reviews of Robert Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
POOR GIRL by Elizabeth Taylor
“There are a lot of throats about.”
At first simply a pen portrait of a lonely Governess, separate from the other servants’ comraderie in the house. But this ineluctably becomes — almost without our or even the author’s volition to to control it — a truly great ghost story. It is as if the author herself is bewitched. Or is it a ghost story at all? Is it sleep-walking, is it suggestion, omosis, a little 7 year old boy’s telepathy with the man he will become, as he bewitches — by flirtation and leaning against her as she checks his sums with the stain of red ink or rouge, or simple evil desires that smell like a scent — his Governess, Florence Chasty, or she unknowingly bewitches him? His mother as involuntary stooge to such shenanigans by thinking she senses them happening? The boy who has within himself the man he will become, a philanderer like his father, or is it his father who enters Florence’s room for canoodling, or is she already a ghost of someone else, i.e. possessed by a woman with green beads as necklace that break and are spilt on the floor of this story? Florence who naively thinks of her childhood home. Yes, a truly great story. The scent of evil infuses every word, innocence, too. Remarkable!
“She leaned back against the chimney-piece and looped about her fingers a long necklace of glittering green beads. ‘Where did these come from?’ she wondered. She could not remember ever having seen them before, but she could not pursue her bewilderment, for the necklace felt familiar to her hands, much more familiar than the rest of the room.”
My review of Elizabeth Taylor’s collected stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/complete-short-stories-elizabeth-taylor/
THE ONLY STORY by William Trevor
“‘The house is full of smiling people,’ I said. ‘There’s a child on the stairs’”
I had claimed, till today, that I had read and reviewed all of the many William Trevor Stories (variously linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/) but this work proves me wrong, having now discovered it, by chance, through obtaining this (increasingly impressive) anthology for the sole purpose of reading the Marghanita Laski work!
This William Trevor is a powerful attrition of a man having found the hindsight of his life pointless, writing in an exercise book, and now abandoned by his wife (and children) with the help of her Wing Commander father, and remembering when working for an advertising agency he had hit a client in the form of an epiphany after working on many tedious projects… now haunted by, inter alios, the author pretending to be his brother (thus making himself nothing at all but fiction?)…this work somehow becoming, ironically for me, William’s only story! If I understand it correctly.
“Oh God, make William understand.”
Beware Spoilers
IN THE DARK by E. Nesbit
This is the well-known story (obliquely disturbing for its own sake) about a man called George Visger as seen through the eyes of a narrator who also filters for us a mutual acquaintance called Haldane. Visger is described by this narrator as a ‘beast’ from outset, filling us with Visger’s evil aura and clairvoyant ability — and when we hear what Haldane tells the narrator, i.e. just as Haldane was in the process of murdering Visger — for wronging Haldane vis à vis the latter’s fiancée who had then given Haldane up and later died — Visger warned Haldane, with his skill of foretelling, that his body would not be easily disposed of afterwards! And so it turns out to transpire, through various memorable scenes, as told to us, about Visger’s body recurrently turning up!
Yet the original rumour had been that Visger had gone abroad to “preach vegetarianism to the cannibals”, while the narrator had already told us that he had sent Haldane a box of furs as a wedding present, which at the end becomes a box containing the ‘skins of beasts’ together with Visger’s body and the body of a ‘hawker of pens in city offices — subject to fits.’ Dwell on all that and the implications!
Any thoughts welcome? This work continues to defeat me!
From Internet…
… of great concern to Bernard Shaw was the plight of animals; he was strict vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist and opponent of cruel sports. Shaw became a vegetarian in 1881 and remained so for sixty-six years until his death in 1950.
Edith Nesbit had an affair with Shaw.
My review of E. Nesbit’s ‘Man-Size in Marble’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/unfinished-business-a-ghost-story-anthology/#comment-26100
MRS PORTER AND MISS ALLEN by Hugh Walpole
A strong ghost story or is it a combined belief in the gradual evolution of a ghost over time between the Mrs P who feared her cruel husband returning from the dead as he had so convincingly promised to do and the Miss A (to whom Mrs P her told about such a promise), Miss A being her young companion who found herself witnessing such an evil ghostly evolution and involuntarily imparting her own belief back to Mrs P?!
My own belief, as a reader, in the ghost, too, was imparted to me and thus into strengthening even more of the ghost back within the story’s ‘battleground’ of a secluded house (with pink sofa, gate-legged table, birdcage and clock her husband had never seen) in the very centre of London. I wonder if Miss A ever got to the end of reading aloud Dickens to Mrs P?
ON TERMS by Christine Brooke-Rose
The nature of consciousness after death as a literary experiment in repetition and point of view, a street like a vampire’s jaw, suicide, decay, wedding, bride, an older lady, coffin, wedding carnation stolen from the coffin’s flowers, etc. and I suggest that most people will either not finish reading it or become a ghost of themself, as I just did. Someone else is writing this review of it, and, with the story’s author being dead, I take some responsibility for it like a literary Godparent. The nearest any set of words has come to describing what a ghost is and how it can possibly exist and being ‘on terms’ with it as oneself. A new self born, as the old self finishes reading it, but the old self is still here as a ghost in the brain helping to write this review.
My review of MANNA IN MID-WILDERNESS by Natalie Ferris — an article on Christine Brooke-Rose: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/22/well-never-have-paris/#comment-16293
My review of RED RUBBER GLOVES by Christine Brooke-Rose: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1207-2/#comment-2518
Pingback: Links to some of my recent reviews of miscellaneous and older ghost or horror stories…. | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
A SHORT TRIP HOME by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I was near her, for I had lingered behind in order to get the short walk with her from the living-room to the front-door.”
The narrator is obsessed with protecting Ellen because he worships her, and he watches over her in the St. Paul area of Minnesota and her relationships with other men; he knows, at heart, there is no chance for himself with her. Eventually, beyond the adeptly evoked social interactions of the place, a strong ghost story emerges from the narration about one particular man the narrator combats because she is captivated with this man, a man who turns out to be dead, a man who ‘works the trains.’ A stylish work that reveals much about the narrator.
“Then I saw what I had not seen before — that his forehead was drilled with a small round hole like a larger nail leaves when it’s pulled from a plaster wall.”
THE BLACKMAILERS by Algernon Blackwood
A revelation. A new Blackwood ghost story for me. One featuring a loving now upstanding narrator whose backstory’s extra-marital regrets are held in tangible letters, letters that a poignantly reluctant blackmailer holds and faces the narrator with, and the sad blackmailer is desperate enough to force money out of the narrator. The plural of the title has many ramifications of who is blackmailing whom? And the ghostly ending is so expected it was unexpected. Or vice versa.
Blackwood lost in a black wood of guilt?
My previous reviews of Blackwood: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/13/the-listener-algernon-blackwood/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/ancient-sorceries-and-other-chilling-tales-by-algernon-blackwood/
ALL BUT EMPTY by Graham Greene
Who else has come across this brief but chilling ghost story? The description of an all but empty cinema in the early thirties, and the old man who talks, inter alia, of black beetles, having sat near you in the auditorium.
My review of this other strange work by the same author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/under-the-garden-graham-greene/
And another significant short GG work here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/18/to-unswallow-god/
YESTERDAY STREET by Thomas Burke
If this story’s predictable ending-in-hindsight had not been included, this would have been one of the greatest oblique ghost stories ever, and far more famous a story than it has become, indeed a Proustian masterpiece of regaining lost time … a story telling of a successful business man who is induced by unknown forces to return to his boyhood suburban street in London from forty years before and meeting there the three kids he used to play with, including his once budding misunderstood love for the girl called Jenny Wrenn, and she and the two boys accepting him as he used to be, despite his smart grown-up appearance….
My 2011 review of A SMOKE GHOST by Fritz Leiber, Jr. — https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-weird-4/
CLOSE BEHIND HIM by John Wyndham
“‘You been hit, Bill?’
He looked at her, elbows on the table, his head supported between his hands.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It ain’t me what’s making them marks, Liz — it’s what’s following’ me.’”
Two burglars inadvertently disturb an occultist at home, and one of them ends up ‘croaking’ him because of his strange demeanour. The burglars escape the house but each, in turn, after much skullduggery between them, are dogged by footsteps in the ground behind them. I feel this story will dog me, too, now! Too late, once you’ve read it!
I KISS YOUR SHADOW—
by Robert Bloch
“Only I was a special reader.”
A bit of a mishmash of a story about a brother and his sister’s ghost coming back with arms held out, as she did in life, for a kiss from her erstwhile fiancé. Questions on the nature of the car accident when she died, and who was implicated, and the involvement now of the fiancé’s shrink amid various possible suicides and succubi.
THE PORTOBELLO ROAD by Muriel Spark
“People take up space in a house out of proportion to their size.”
A rather silly story, if a slightly witty and well-written one, about a woman nick-named Needle who, as a young girl, accidentally found a needle in a haystack when with other children, Kathleen, George and Skinny. A photo of them was taken. And the plot centres upon their story into the future, of life interrupting their own romances, and there are African scenes, some worries over mixed marriages between races, and possible bigamy, murder, assumed madness, and the narrator who is a ghost. Don’t go there!
My review of the same author’s BANG BANG YOU’RE DEAD: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1207-2/#comment-2505
And of Muriel Spark’s ‘The Executor’ : https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26965-2/#comment-15695
THE LOVES OF LADY PURPLE by Angela Carter
“Perhaps every single fair is no more than a disassociated fragment of one single, great, original fair which was inexplicably scattered long ago in a diaspora of the amazing.”
This is a remarkable discovery of a story as fiction-truth-by-gestalt. The synergy, with erotic implications, of puppeteer and his puppet and with, young nephew and very young foundling dumb girl as assistants, the puppeteer tours his show amid ‘mice of light’ and ‘reptilian liquidity’, thus creating his marionette show centred upon the whorish evil of Lady Purple who gradually comes alive off the page through Carter’s living, concrepitescent words. But who creates whom, who destroys whom in this story’s story within it? And whence the world that both stories create by some sort of preternatural magic? What the outcome, when the gestalts’s pieces fall back into place? A story sucked by a kiss into existence into or from a loophole that the metaphysics of fairground freakishness and wish fulfilment reveal.
But what do I know? Merely my instinct to go on, and only four previous reviews by me about Angela Carter’s work over the years: HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.
REVENANT AS TYPEWRITER by Penelope Lively
A rather snobbish, self-assured academic woman, who lectures on literature and with various pretensions in her potential love life, and patronising an audience at a Lit Society evening when she lectured on the place of ghosts in literature, not that she believed in ghosts per se. And, by the aid of a dress-maker’s dummy and the reversal of the internal decorations our snobbish lady had made to the house from showy to her own taste in artworks on white, her poshness is gradually subsumed by the blousy, woman of bad taste whose house she had bought after the woman had died….! The ghost had also been in the erstwhile lecture audience!
Not much to recommend here other than to state that the blousy woman ghost has not yet managed to infiltrate our posh lady’s typewriter sufficiently so as to down-market Lively’s excellent storytelling prose. When I read this work again, though — which I certainly won’t do — perhaps it will be a different story!
The next story I reviewed in 2011, as follows, in the context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/260-2/
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The Little Dirty Girl – Joanna Russ
“She refused to go to the zoo (‘An animal jail!’)…”
“Autumn came.” We all once had “the sheer, elastic wealth of children’s bodies”, yet we end up possibly with cancer or with looking in the mirrored walls of Kent and Hallby’s to see one’s essential self as a depleting physical shape – as the ghost of self haunts our older versions – in a haunting transfiguration in synergy with a mother and daughter symbiosis (cf: ‘My Mother’ by Jamaica Kincaid) – A.R.: Alter Revenant? Meanwhile, it is a highly memorable ghost story – a well-characterised spirit of a spirited little-girl waif-and-stray with ghost-clothes and dirt to bath off, a disarming penchant for Milky Ways and a “little skull coming through her skin“. Astonishing. (And more cats and the main protagonist’s “kitty-booting” (like Maybury) to match this book’s other earlier pet-cruelties!)
Other reviews of Joanna Russ: https://howivi.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-science-fiction/ and https://etepsed.wordpress.com/907-2/
WATCHING ME, WATCHING YOU by Fay Weldon
“Many houses contain ghosts. (It would be strange if they didn’t.)”
This story – constituted by many gapped paragraphs with much wall to wall, edge to edge dialogue – spanning 1965 to 1980 in a city’s suburbs and the lives that link a couple of those houses and also the ghost that journeys between them carrying their fates as burdens and as catalyst or cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause upon or by humans who live or grow there, or all of these things — their cursed endings one of which ignited the ghost, their later marital flings or permanent disloyalties, the consequent births of more humans as potential people with subsequent growth into such people, and the necessity of at least one of them to write something worthwhile that also pays money. To keep the ghost from the door. The author now, in our own real-time, is all of those things, even this story’s gestalt as ghost or ghost as gestalt?
Pingback: WATCHING ME, WATCHING YOU by Fay Weldon | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
To be continued below…
THE JULY GHOST by A.S. Byatt
“‘No illusions are pleasant,’…”
A man’s story told to an American woman at a party about meeting a married woman at another party and then lodging — with her as his ‘landlady’ (note that word literally) — at her house to escape his loss of his own woman Anne to another man. Already a disarmingly tangled situation, but then factor in the story of a blonde haired boy with a notable smile and other recognisable clothes arriving in the garden of his landlady (whose own husband has, by now, as we watch it happen, argued with her and left her) when her lodger is sitting at the same time in that very garden, apparently the ghost of the landlady’s son that only the lodger can see and converse with, the son who left the garden one previous July and been lethally run over by a car near a South London common. What is the common ground or land? Well, it is the reader’s mind who will remain haunted by the recurring vision of this ghostly boy and his catalytic attempts for the landlady and her lodger to reproduce him. Sad and lingering story — and proof that fiction can create real ghosts. But do humans tend only to find any such visions to be uneasy or unpleasant illusions and will not let them cohere further from apparent fiction reality into the hard truth where they ever exist without our fully acknowledging them? The boy’s smile prevails and makes this story something of a rare version of fiction where the answer to that question is ‘no’ whatever the story characters (more ghostly than the ghost itself?) themselves say about illusions.
THE HIGHBOY by Alison Lurie
“The highboy had not moved; but now it looked heavy and sullen, and seemed to have developed a kind of vestigial face. The brass pulls of the two top drawers formed the half-shut eyes of this face, and the fluted columns between them was its long thin nose; the ornamental brass keyhole of the full-length drawer below supplied a pursed, tight mouth. Under its curved mahogany tricorne hat, it had a mean, calculating expression,…[…] The irritating thing was that now I’d seen the unpleasant face of the highboy, it was there every time…”
….being the high point of this story in which I got confused about the human characters within which fiction array this bird-like piece of furniture featured, a haunting pareidolia and sense of potential anthropomorphic retribution or selfful protection from an otherwise inanimate object. No wonder it outshone the characters it controlled! It even controlled the author writing about it, I sensed. And now it has come into counterpoint with a rare reader of this story and yearns to reside in some heaven’s museum of a receptive brain as a sort of posterity. Or hell’s? (My family had a highboy in the 1950s when I was a boy, but we called it a tallboy. Not sure what that signifies. In any event, I recall that tallboy was plain and unassuming.)
THE MEETING HOUSE by Jane Gardam
“In April there were rainbows, often far below him and sometimes upside down. In May, a madness of cuckoos. A preserved and empty country.”
The touching, time-remembering story of a now derelict Northwest community that once merely existed around a pigsty, and a Quaker Meeting House, still intact, and its small house appendix in near ruin here taken over by a squatting family, wife with tumour, a cussing father who did his best to renovate the roof etc. And the stoical forbearance of the Friends who still employ the Meeting House for their silences… trying to get through the squatters’s rubbish and withstand the seemingly spiteful noise deliberately breaking the holy silences of the Friends. Yet, eventually, and I won’t spoil it by saying quite how this is done, the story becomes a fitful conclusion as a “confident, peaceful, luminous” ghosts’ epiphany for this eclectic book of often fearful stories about ghosts. We meet together in silence just at the endless point of departing?
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