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Book Review | ‘The Woman in Black’ by Susan Hill

28 Sunday Oct 2012

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The Woman in BlackThe Woman in Black by Susan Hill

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

“I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.”

This was one of those books that had come to my attention thanks to the Hollywood remake. The visuals in the trailer were fabulously dark and grotesque and held a sort of promise of the type of Gothic we just don’t get to see nowadays. But that was the movie, and I so desperately wanted to see it that I had to first hunt down the book. Which, as you know, is just the weird order in which I do things.

I finally managed to get a copy and settled down to be scared out of my wits by this ‘Jane Austen-esque ghost story‘, but to my disappointment found it very dry in description and wanting in the scare department. Maybe I had far too high an expectation of what is in reality, just a mediocre chilling tale about a vengeful spirit who haunts a remote backwater village.

The basic outline of the story goes like this: The story begins with Arthur Kipps, who begins to write about his terrible, real-life encounter with a ghost during his early days as an up and coming solicitor. He recounts how a business trip sent him to the remote  and forbidden Eel Marsh House to attend the funeral of the late Alice Drablow and complete the menial task of putting her legal papers in order. However, when Kipps asks about the Drablow estate, no one wants to speak about it. A mysterious woman dressed in black with a decaying countenance also seems to haunt him wherever he goes.

When he asks to be taken across the Nine Lives Causeway to the estate, no one is willing to take him, except one man. There in all its wild beauty and agonising splendor he encounters Eel Marsh House, a solitary Gothic mansion, standing alone, proud and teeming with terrible secrets. As he spends his days and nights there, hears the awful bumping sounds from the locked nursery room and witnesses the ghostly screams of a drowned child on the gurgling causeway, he realises he must leave quickly, or risk going mad.

“Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not ‘real’. No. But what was ‘real’? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.”

This had the opportunity to become a great ghost story. It’s just I’m really upset that Susan Hill sinks into the comfort of Victorian descriptions which make it too stuffy and constricting. Language-wise some areas are far too overly done while other parts could have benefited from more visual description.

I loved the idea of an isolated house that stood almost like a lighthouse in the middle of the deadly causeway. The house itself is very scary and the descriptions of it will stay with me for a long time. I almost half wish it existed, like Manderley in ‘Rebecca’ or the mansion in Shirley Jackson‘s ‘The Haunting of Hill House‘. The sounds across the causeway, and the idea that the death of a child is resurrected and replayed there every night in the swirling mists is also very disconcerting.

What I really wanted was a spotlight on the woman in black herself. She takes a back seat when she really shouldn’t. Even the house eclipses her.

I had some discussions with other people and their experience of the book compared to the movie and theatre versions and all have said the same thing: the original story is quite bland. I am hoping to see the stage version of this with a class of mine and hope it’s as good as they say it is! But one thing is for sure, it will be vastly different from the book, because every stage and film production that has been made in the past has taken liberties with the story and changed it dramatically to make it better. More proof that Hill was being a bit economical with her story?

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Book Review | ‘The Doll and Other Stories’ by Daphne Du Maurier

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

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The Doll Short StoriesThe Doll Short Stories by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here is an early showcase of Du Mauriers’ literary prowess and her interest for certain themes that she would develop later into full length novels. In this little medley of tales one can spot a prototype of ‘Manderley’ house as well as recurrences of the blood-red azaleas that have become synonymous with it (the haunted setting of her most acclaimed novel ‘Rebecca’).

Overall, the stories centre on the varying degrees of sexual degeneration and the disintegration of relationships. These are explored from different angles, be it through the eyes of a prostitute or an emotionally disturbed violinist. I got a sense that as a young writer, Du Maurier understood the value of subtlety, as even her most extreme story mostly hinges on the power of suggestion. As in the fashion of the great gothic novels like ‘The Monk’ nothing is openly described but more or less alluded to.

Surprisingly, most of these were written during the authors younger years when I suppose her sexual curiosity was at its’ peak. But even then she approached her material with a maturity far beyond her years. This was raw talent trying to find its ultimate shape and form on some very sharp and often risqué ideas.

One particular story (and I can’t review without mentioning it) stands out as the most shocking. Nearly all her stories probe the dark recesses of the human psyche in one way or another, but this one tale really had me bewildered with its’ brazen pornographic twist. ‘The Doll’ is a story I can only describe as lurid and bold. It is dripping with sexual immorality and during its’ time must have caused quite a stir, as the immorality stems from a woman. The story is accessed through a fragment of letters discovered washed up on the shore. While the author is unknown, the account is legible enough to be understood, which turns out to be a strange confessional of an ex-lover who reveals one woman’s dark secret and her sickening fetish for a life-like, mechanical doll called Julio.

Now forgive me, but I didn’t know they actually HAD sex dolls back in the late 1800’s, especially ones that functioned. There is something very creepy about the thought of a cultured woman, carrying around this portable boyfriend in her trunk. The idea has a faint science-fictiony feel to it as I am reminded of the Japanese anime ‘Ghost-in-the-Shell: Innocence’, where the plot revolves around a load of ‘gynoids’ (robotic geishas) that suddenly go homicidal. Nothing like that happens here of course, but throughout the anime deep psychological questions were asked about why the dolls were created, and what they really represented outside their obvious functions. Because of this, I actually found myself attempting to relate with the doll as opposed to the other two characters, which as you can imagine made things more disturbing! Another book I should mention(and have not read yet) is ‘Locus Solus’ by Raymond Roussel, a surrealist take on the absurdities of scientific experimentation and the book which inspired a big part of the anime in question.

But I digress. As I read ’The Doll’, I got the feeling that this was evidence of Du Maurier playing in the sandbox of her ideas. There is an experimental quality to each story, but recurring characters like Maisie the prostitute shows she definitely had something in mind. It is also here that one can see early sketches of her now infamous Rebecca. If you like this book I recommend Raymond Carvers ‘Beginners’ for further reading, which is far sharper and more modern.

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