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 co-option 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 take a hold 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.

Burying The Past

Only posting a couple of times a week means I get very behind in my reviews. Several weeks ago now I read a very good psychological thriller, Ghost Song, by Sarah Rayne, who was a new author to me. It was one of those books that gets off to a cracking start and manages to hold your attention easily, even though it was quite long (471 pages) and involved a number of intertwined story lines crossing over from the past into the present. The story revolves around an old music hall in London, the Tarleton, which has been kept shut up and closed down since the start of the First World War, with no sign of a renaissance in sight. The book opens with surveyor, Robert Fallon, making the annual report on the building and visiting it for the first time. He falls into a kind of fascination with the place, despite, or maybe because of, its eerie nature, the rustlings of ghostly presences, and the clumsily built brick wall that cuts off half the understage area and cannot be penetrated. It is obvious that the theatre has a secret deep in its unlit and unlovely depths. We then get transported back to May 1914 with the Tarleton a lively going concern, run by singer songwriter Toby Chance and owned by his parents, the unlikely but devoted combination of a former showgirl and a government minister. Already the theatre is haunted, but it’s Toby’s very present liaison with a high society woman that will lead him into terrible danger. From now on the book works to bring the past forward and to take the present backwards until the mystery is solved.

Bringing together past and present is the Harlequin Society, specialists and consultants on nineteenth-century theatre who have custody of the Tarleton. Researcher Hilary Bryant is determined to uncover its secrets and joins forces with Robert Fallon, whose professional desire to find out what lies behind the wall becomes inseparable from compelling curiosity. Ranged against them, however, is Hilary’s boss, Shona Seymour, who has her own reasons for wanting the theatre to be left untouched, its ghosts undisturbed. Shona’s story develops until it takes equal prominence with that of the music hall, and the deftness with which Sarah Rayne weaves her tales together is really admirable. Shona has grown up in a grim family environment, with a harshly authoritarian grandfather, a mother turning to drink, and a father who is never mentioned. Her one most persistent childhood memory, which returns to her in nightmares, is of mother and grandfather burying a body in the cellar of their cold and comfortless house in Scotland. The parallel that the story sets up here, between cellars, bodies and concealing walls that never quite manage to do their job well enough is, I think, enticingly explored.

Reading the book, it struck me that the essence of the psychological thriller is repetition. There is nothing we fear so much as the mere thought of what was traumatic and troubling in the past occurring once again in the present. Freud termed it Nachträglichkeit, a process in which one’s warning systems become wise after the event and exist forever more on a hair trigger, anticipating wildly at the first indication that similar events may arise. So Hilary and Robert may well be spooked by ghosts and naturally fearful at digging about (literally) in bricked up underground caverns, but it is Shona, who has been here before in a terrifying and unresolved way, who suffers extreme anxiety and blinding panic at the mere thought of the mysterious theatre wall. The psychological thriller pits its protagonists against their deepest fears, and provides overwhelming compulsions as to why they should confront them – certainly they would not do so otherwise. And the reader can sympathise with the fears evoked, with the vulnerability of the protagonists, but also perhaps with the courage they show or else with the certainty that the story will provide a satisfying resolution. But what seemed to strike me most forcibly was how powerful the past is, how tightly it clings and how difficult it is to shake it off. Our entire adult lives are spent wrestling with the ghosts of unresolved things, of nameless fears and unexplained distress, as well as with the direct consequences of our choices and actions.

The ghosts in Ghost Song arise out of all levels of past and present, and they are both malevolent and benign. What I most appreciated about this book was its richness of theme and its clever use of the multi-stand plot. There were a number of twists and turns I didn’t see coming (although I should in all fairness say here that I am quite dense about plot and fairly easily surprised), but all the different stories were gripping in their way and well balanced. And the resolution that arises out of them, the way they interconnect at the conclusion, was most satisfying. This isn’t great literature, but that isn’t always what a person wants to read. I found this an extremely good example of its genre, pacy, engaging, quite spooky at times and very well structured. Is it enough to say I went to amazon afterwards and bought two more books by the same author?