A wife’s monologue that veers from scathing to self-pitying Surreal novel explores possibility of afterlife
Ghost story leaves no room for ambiguity about supernatural
THIS engaging debut is the latest in a wave of Irish fiction about alienated young women coming of age after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
It’s told by Alannah, an arts graduate who broke off from postgraduate research in London to live in rural Ireland with Harry, a married screenwriter, in a heady affair that didn’t last.
Now, six years later and not yet 30, she’s the wife of another older man (unnamed), who has two children from past liaisons.
In Alannah’s telling, the relationships merge as she cuts between them in a nervy monologue that veers from scathing to self-pitying – not least when it comes to the cosseted upbringing of her well-to-do husband, who eyes a job as a government speechwriter.
Plot isn’t the point here; rather, the novel gets its energy from the sour kick to its intelligently disaffected narration, as Campbell pins down fleeting impressions from a life textured by memory.
IF THE existence of a ghost is proof of an afterlife, then one can argue ghost stories are ultimately optimistic.
From the moment William moves into a haunted brownstone, there is no ambiguity as to whether supernatural phenomena are occurring or if there is some sort of afterlife. Yet one would be hard pressed to describe the sombre tone and strange goings-on in “Ghostland” as optimistic. This pensive, surreal novel employs a decidedly ontological approach to the ghost story.
“Every room we enter is immediately haunted,” exclaims Charlotte, a librarian and occult enthusiast, in the opening line. Who – or what – is the source of the haunting is the central question posed.
Charlotte, obsessed with a 90-year-old library patron, Leonard Stick, frequently visits him after work in his purportedly haunted building. One night she doesn’t return home to her husband and 7-year-old son, William. She is eventually found in a secluded archival room of the library, lost in a fugue. It is revealed that Mr Stick has been dead for a month. Charlotte returns home but suffers from dementia-like episodes. Three weeks later she wakes William, asks him to hold her hand, and dies. Fast-forward almost two decades and William’s father is killed in a car accident.
William, inheritor of his mother’s fascination with the occult as well as insurance money, purchases Stick’s “abnormally narrow but otherwise unremarkable” brownstone.
The building itself evolves and reshapes, reacting to William’s moods and preternatural state of grief, loneliness and longing.
It is host to a number of quirky characters and mysteries, both otherworldly and not: a threewinged pigeon that stubbornly visits the same windowsill; a recalcitrant but unseen basement resident; a large queen centipede with a personality akin to a loyal family dog; and the ghost of a young woman named June.
Through trial and error, William and June devise a way to communicate. Yearning for a connection, William resolves to help her solve the mystery of her death as well as find a way to release her from the liminal state in which she’s confined. He discovers that a mystical book called The Book of Elements, one his mother spent her final days searching for with Leonard Stick, may provide a way for June to be released from her earthly bounds.
The spells he must perform are tedious as well as physically and psychically punishing.
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