Ghost in the machine
A posthumously published adult novel by children’s author Mel Peet is one of his best.
Shortly after the end of World War II, ex-soldier Martin Heath, suffering from what would now be recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder, takes a job on the edge of Dartmoor as factotum to an “immensely elderly” gentleman, Harold Godley, whose only son was killed in the previous war.
Having had a crack at resuming his studies at Cambridge, Martin’s decision about returning after Christmas is taken out of his hands – the raging polar winter of 1947, lasting three months, did what Hitler had failed to do. “It invaded England, crushed it, brought it to a standstill”, and the subsequent thaw flooded the fens around Cambridge. When Martin gets a letter from his former commanding officer offering him an interesting position, his nightmares come back to haunt him.
The legendary children’s author Mal Peet, who died in 2015, penned this novella when he was writer-in-residence at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters, in the summer of 2013. Begun before he’d set out from his UK home, it was intended, as might be expected from the author of a clutch of award-winning children’s and YA titles, to be aimed at young people. But what he’d envisaged as “a short ghost story for children” became, as his widow, Elspeth Graham-Peet, says in the preface, neither short nor for children.
The ghost of the title is a huge, gleamingly seductive, ivory Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville. But there
The ghost of the title is a huge, gleamingly seductive, ivory RollsRoyce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville.
are also the ghosts that invade Martin’s head nightly: dead comrades, the dummy that wears Godley’s dead son’s uniform, the silent skeletons from the hell that was Belsen. Pills and alcohol being hard to get, he takes to sitting in the Phantom several nights a week, where his own
dreams can intercede – including fantasies of sex with Godley’s household help, Annie.
A strange blend of history, mystery, romance and ghost story that subverts all genres into the “whimsical alchemy” he so admires, this is Peet at his very best – pared-back storytelling with never a word out of place. It is masterful writing that invites frequent rereading. Where others might make a full-blown novel from these bare bones, Peet whittles back the words, crafting short sentences that can build explosive scenarios in a mere paragraph.
Unforgettable.