What Book to Read?

It is just coincidence that I read The Séance (2008) directly after Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) – see my last post.  Both deal with aspects of what Freud called ‘the black tide of mud of occultism’, and both got me thinking about how enthusiastically the Victorians embraced the irrational, despite (or even because of?) their faith in science and material progress.

The Séance is written in the form of a nineteenth century novel, made up of a series of narratives, a structure popularised by Wilkie Collins: see my posts on The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). In the first narrative Constance Langton tells how her mother has never recovered from the death of her daughter Alma, and how Constance tries her own séance in the hope of comforting her. She then takes her to professional séances. Constance knows that what happens there is fraudulent, but can’t help feeling a frisson when Alma appears to her mother. Does she have psychic powers herself? The second narrative, written some twenty years earlier, gives a family lawyer’s account of ‘the strange and terrible events at Wraxford Hall’, which Constance has inherited. Can people really vanish into thin air? A further narrative tells how ten years before that, Eleanor Unwin came to marry Dr Magnus Wraxford, well known mesmerist and owner of the sinister Wraxford Hall. Eleanor is subject to visitations which seem to foretell disaster. Is she crazy? If not, how can these manifestations be explained? Subsequent narratives link the earlier ones, and tell an intricately crafted and compelling story. For, unlike in Wilkie Collins, not all narratives are to be trusted, and can confuse as well as inform. I found the book hard to put down.

I really like the way Harwood writes. He seems so at home in the nineteenth century that description and dialogue, attitudes and manners, all seem completely authentic to the period. I’m perhaps having a bit of a double standard here; I was critical of Kostova’s failure to differentiate the voices of her narrators, but do not feel the same concern about Harwood’s, even though they are not sharply differentiated by voice either. I guess it is because each voice – educated Victorian – is so true to its circumstances that I don’t need further differentiation.

Reading this, I was reminded of A.S. Byatt’s treatment of spiritualism in Possession, where it is an acceptable social practice, particularly among middle class women.  Many people believed in the possibility of a spirit world, separated from this world by only a thin and sometimes permeable barrier. Spiritualism thrived on disasters like the loss of a loved one, giving consolation that was not so much an alternative to religion as an extension of it. As Constance says, ‘for those like my mother, who are simply crushed by the weight of grief, why deprive them of the comfort a séance can bring?’ But those said to have, or claiming psychic powers tread a narrow line between fraud and self delusion possibly amounting to madness. The asylum is what Eleanor fears.

Though they both deal with the occult, the approach to it in Kostova’s and Harwood’s books is quite different. With vampires at large in the present day in The Historian, you have to suspend disbelief. The spiritualism in The Séance is mostly presented with the genuine scepticism of the time, as expressed for example by members of the Society for Psychical Research, which plays an important part in the plot. Even for the member of the Society whose job it is to expose frauds, ‘the verdict is not yet in’. Credulity and superstition are, however, also important to the story, and I think the power of myth-making about the supernatural is as central as whether or not there is any truth in spiritualism.

It was coincidence that I read them close together, but perhaps not coincidence that two books about subjects that fall within Kostova’s ‘subtext of the ordinary narrative of history’ should appear close together. There have been a number of pastiche Victorian novels written recently, and it’s not surprising that writers looking for a new approach turn to ‘the black tide of mud’ that ran beneath conventional nineteenth century society. It is perhaps more pertinent to ask why we are so keen to read about it? I am, anyway. I can’t wait for Harwood’s next book.

You can read my post on Harwood’s first book, The Ghost Writer (2004), here. As I noted in that post, there’s not much about Harwood on the internet, but you can read a review of The Séance here, and see him talking about the book here.