2006 psychological thriller. After a highly public series of tragic
incidents, Antonia Weston goes to Cheshire to stay in a cottage near a
small market town, hoping for anonymity and peace. But she soon
experiences a series of events which seem to be echoing the past she's
trying to forget.
This book starts off really well. Antonia is, it soon becomes
apparent, just out of prison, and she's having trouble getting out of
the passive and institutional mindset she had to put herself into in
order to survive there. So when weird things start happening – a
familiar-looking car seems to be following her even though its owner
is long dead, a local cat apparently gets into her locked house and
abstracts salmon from the fridge – everything is in doubt. Antonia
knows that she's not in a normal state of mind: maybe she did miss an
unlocked window, maybe she is really making things up, or maybe there
really are ghosts in some small way. Certainly enough bad things seem
to have happened in the area over the years…
(And because I haven't previously read anything by Rayne, and because
I know this isn't part of a series, I don't know whether in this
book's world ghosts are going to be possible, whether Antonia might
actually be going mad, or… all sorts of other explanations.)
But then, to my mind, Rayne drops the ball completely at the end of
chapter seven (of 41), with several paragraphs explaining that this
entity is the cause of all the oddity, for these reasons, with
these goals. I'd been enjoying the book, spending time inside
Antonia's mind as she tried to work out what was going on and her own
state of sanity, but at that point I lost interest. Without the puzzle
to solve, all that's left is "horrible things happen to a woman who
doesn't know why".
Which, oddly enough, is also the B story, dealing with the travails of
Maud Lincoln, at the same place but some time in the late nineteenth
century. For all sorts of good and sufficient reasons there is nobody
to help her as she is repeatedly maltreated, and eventually locked up
as a lunatic in Latchkill Asylum. The description of her repeated
rapes and degradations came to feel frankly prurient, and elements of
her mental state were straight out of Edgar Allen Poe.
The prose is marvellous, well-formed and well-observed, in particular
the use of the idea of "spider-light", the twilight that makes visible
things which can't be seen at other times… but there's no mystery here
(other than "in what state will this character end up"), just the
suspense as Antonia slowly, slowly works out what we have been
explicitly told is going on, and that hugely decreased my enjoyment of
the book. It doesn't help that the later parts of the story fall into
a repetitive pattern of incident and ineffective response,
interspersed with Maud's horrors.
This could have been so much better. Drop the direct narration of the
historical story and tell it only through Antonia's research (leaving
the villain of that a mystery too, until it can be worked out,
rather than introducing her as such in the first words of the
historical narrative); and drop the early explanation of what's going
on in the present day, leaving the reader to work it out along with
Antonia. That could have made for a rather shorter but very much more
enjoyable book. Alas, it's not the one that was published.
I think this is the sort of book that is enjoyed by people other than
me.
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