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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 | ‘Winter Trees’ – Sylvia Plath

15 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by in Book Review, Poetry

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Book Challenges: 50 Books A Year (no. 36)

This slim collection contains poems by the late Sylvia Plath which were written during the last nine months of her life. They are hailed to be the most revealing and enigmatic of her works which document the simultaneous mourning and celebration of the human condition.

It is hard to read a Plath poem without taking her life into consideration. While most poets write with pen and ink, you get a sense that Plath went one step further and wrote from the blood. Plath had a dark gift, a way of tapping into the exquisite pain of human suffering that makes her  impossible to separate from her work. Throughout her short career as poet and writer, it was this often too-personal tie that made publishers uncomfortable. Her savage way of conveying her emotions is evident in ‘Lesbos‘; a bitter letter to Sappho which also doubles as an unashamed portrait of Plath’s domestic despair:

“Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible
migraine…

I should sit off a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.”

Needless to say the poems in this book are written from a strong feminist lens and span issues of love, parenting, childbirth and death. Upon my first reading, I found it quite difficult to get into Plath’s particular mindset. But having said this, one must remember that she was probably by now in her deepest depressive stages and suicidal to boot, so it’s only natural for me to connect up to a certain point. The first thing I noted was the darkness that seeped from every poem she wrote. As I re-read them and entered into her narrow, desperate world I realised that these were not ‘poems’ but rather the abstract confessionals of a woman on the edge.

“The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself…” – from Childless Woman

Despair confuses people, and coupled with depression often makes it difficult to see right from wrong. Yet when I analyse Plath’s poems, I realise that despair and depression were her source of sustenance, and this is what makes this collection of poems so special.  Her words are carefully chosen, with a deliberate economy that brings her visions into high-definition. As I finished the last poem ‘Three Women’ (which was intended to be a poem for three voices and later recorded for radio) I saw a sad glimpse of a talent that, if she had lived, would have been one of the greatest modern poets of our times. The piece resonates with the many myriad facets of procreation; the success, loss and abortion of it. It is an echo of womankind through different ages and the other things that ‘mother’ and ‘motherhood’ really give birth to. A masterpiece, and a precursor to the ‘Vagina Monologues‘, here is a small extract:

“I am slow as the world. I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon’s concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility”  

I recommend this to anyone with an interest in Sylvia Plath. For first timers, it may be a bit too much, but reading it a few times over will help you to understand what’s going on. Plath tends to write in cryptic code, cracking the code is a bit like adjusting your eyesight to one of those 3D posters from back in the 90’s. Fun, but it needs a bit of effort, and good poetry always demands a bit of effort from its readers.

I give this 3/5 stars.

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