This 500-page novel, shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize, initially frustrated me. I don’t like to give up on books, but for 200 pages I found it fairly uninvolving. A couple of times I nearly hurled it across the room. Only as I approached the halfway mark did it begin to come alive and hook me in.
The story deals with a country doctor becoming involved with the Ayres family (a mother, her son Roddy and her daughter Caroline) and the fading Warwickshire stately home in which they live. It pretty soon becomes apparent that supernatural forces permeate the house and influence events there – with tragic consequences – but the doctor refuses to accept this possibility and attributes everything to mental delusion. His relationship with the house and family is further complicated when he falls in love with Caroline Ayres.
The supernatural material is handled expertly and with real subtlety. Allowing everything to be explained away, the author enables her narrator to doubt the very events he is observing. But it is infuriating to only see the world through his dull, unimaginative eyes. He’s a stuffy, rigid character, and while the story clearly needs his scepticism, his inflexible worldview does make for a less interesting authorial voice. He’s also there to draw out the theme of class inequality. His attraction to the family is ambiguously tied up with his own social aspirations.
By the end of the book, the slow pace has become transfixing. You know that more bad things are going to happen and sure enough they do.
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