Month: December 2025

Wakenhyrst, by Michelle Paver

by

For the winter solstice I wanted to return to East Anglia and the fens, a time and a place when the veil between our world and another seems to thin. Paver’s novel fit my mood perfectly with its luminous and sometimes eerie descriptions of life in fen country.

Many Gothic novels use a frame story, usually told by an ordinary person, someone the reader can identify with. Then the inner story plunges into the darker twists and turns of human nature before ending with a return to the realistic world, reassuring perhaps, yet still haunted by a suspicion of unease.

Here the frame story takes place in 1966, starting with a magazine article. The first paragraph lands us right in the story.

Like a witch’s lair in a fairytale the ancient manor house crouches in its tangled garden. I can’t take my eyes off the ivy-choked window above the front door. It was from that window in 1913 that 16-year old Maud Sterne watched her father set off down the steps with an ice-pick, a geological hammer—and murder in his heart.

The article’s author describes a visit to the now elderly Maud, alone in her crumbling manor, Wake’s End, in Suffolk. He suggests that Edmund Sterne might have been innocent, adding, “We only have Maud’s word that he did it.” Then comes an exchange of letters between Maud and an academic culminating in her inviting him to Wake’s End.

From there we go into the larger story, beginning in 1906 with young Maud as our guide. The house is situated by Guthlaf’s Fen, one of the few fens that hasn’t been drained to create more farmland. Her father Edmund hates it and won’t allow any of the windows on that side of the house to be opened, but Maud loves it.

To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. In summer the scent of meadowsweet drifted across the Lode and the reeds rang with the eep-eep of frogs. In winter Maud could hear the ice cracking on the Mere and the skies were alive with vast skeins of geese. One afternoon they’d flown right over the garden, and the beat of their winds had lifted Maud as if she were flying.

The sense of dread grows as Maud’s mother suffers multiple unsuccessful pregnancies. “ ‘Perhaps not every night,’ ” the doctor advises, but Edmund brushes him aside. Maud finds her father’s private journal where she learns of the foggy afternoon when Edmund walked by the church in the nearby hamlet of Wakenhyrst. “The church loomed, deep black against the charcoal sky. It seemed not a place of sanctuary, but the menacing relic  of a savage and haunted past.”

Then he tripped over the planks he’d ordered stripped from the chancel arch as part of the renovations. Seeing an eye peering up at him from the grass, he felt a strange sense of guilt and caught “a strong marshy whiff from the fen.”

It turns out that the planks hold a medieval painting that had been whitewashed by the Puritans, a Doom that depicts the Last Judgment, dominated by the gleeful devils torturing the damned. It is restored and mounted in a separate room in the church, yet the painting clings to his imagination until he begins to see devils everywhere.

With the unearthing of the Doom, he comes to believe that “Something has been let loose…” The old superstitions still have a hold, not only on the church-going residents of Wakenhyrst, but also on the manor house where servants tell Maud stories of the fens, and now they gradually take hold of Edmund himself.

Maud finds, though, that her father won’t give up his autocratic grip on the household and is frustrated in her attempts to educate herself. The sense of intrigue grows as she begins to unearth other secrets even as the claustrophobic atmosphere tightens around her.

What I liked about this story was its slow burn. It moves within that liminal space between the ancient mysteries and the modern world without completely spilling over into either horror or rational explanation. I found plenty of tension and suspense, but they are curiously muted by the proximity of reality; somehow that intensifies them.

Framed narratives like this one, with their multiple narrative voices, do increase suspense and also create a sense of unease through the blurring of reality and fiction. There are some daring moves on the author’s part, such as revealing so much in the first paragraph and then staying within that liminal space between the natural and supernatural worlds. I thought she succeeded and look forward to reading more of her work.

Can you recommend a good Gothic novel or perhaps a literary novel with some Gothic attributes?

The Box of Delights, by John Masefield

by

Changing trains on his way home for Christmas from his first term at school, Kay Harker meets an old man who asks Kay to help him lift his large case onto his back. “ ‘Only I do date from pagan times and age makes joints to creak.’ ” Once on the train Kay, who seems to be around eleven or twelve, is approached by two suspicious men dressed as clergymen who entice him into playing cards for money.

When Kay disembarks in Condicote, he finds that his wallet and watch are missing. He meets the old man again, now revealed as a Punch-and-Judy man, who asks him to pass on a warning that “the wolves are running” to a woman outside Bob’s bakery. Carolina Louise, Kay’s guardian while his parents are absent, agrees to the stop and also tells him that the four Jones children will be staying with them at Seekings over Christmas: Peter who is near his age, Jemima, Susan, and young Maria with her revolvers. “ ‘I shall shoot and I shall shock, as long as my name’s Maria,’ ” the girl says later. She might be my favorite character.

The old man, Cole Hawlings, comes to Seekings to give a Punch and Judy show for the children, which he follows with a magical adventure where one thing turns into another, such as when “[i]t seemed to the children that the ceiling above them opened into a forest in a tropical night: they could see giant trees, with the stars in their boughs and fireflies gleaming out.”

Later he entrusts Kay with the magical box of the title with a knob on the outside which enables him to “go small” or “go swift.” Also, each time Kay opens the box, he’s transported into the past where he might meet up with Herne the Hunter, the Lady of the Oak, fairies, or a Roman legion. However, the wolves—human and animal—are after the box and the action accelerates with the robbers “scrobbling” people left, right and center and chasing after the children.

A beloved Christmas favorite in England since 1935, The Box of Delights is now available in the U.S. from the New York Review of Books in a revised edition that restores sections cut from previous versions and has been corrected from the manuscript. John Masefield was a well-known poet (author of “Sea Fever,” my mother’s favorite poem) and poet laureate for England from 1930-1967.

After finishing this book, I learned that it’s the sequel to The Midnight Folk, which I haven’t read. This could be why I was so confused at the beginning. I couldn’t figure out who Carolina Louise was—another child?—or where all the parents were? Yet my discombobulation turned out to be good preparation for the wild proceedings to come; the book does come at you fast and furious, with kidnappings, chases, robberies, and terrifying escapes. We’re told as writers to teach our readers how to read our book. Mission accomplished, Mr. Masefield!

It seems clear that Masefield’s book influenced many later children’s stories: T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone (1938), Elizabeth Goudge’s The Well of the Star (1941), C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1948), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973), and probably even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. 

Today’s children might have trouble untangling the period slang, historical references, and folklore. Also, unlike the books mentioned above, the plot, if it exists at all, seems almost beside the point until we get towards the end. Instead, we fall from a fairly ordinary train journey into a series of increasingly odd adventures which are indeed delightful but can leave the reader feeling unmoored. Still, I hope children will try it; adults, too.

This is a book I will return to during the holiday season, as so many others do. I’ll probably skip around to favorite bits rather than read it straight through, but we’ll see.

Is there a book you like to reread in December?

Reprise: Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton

by

In one of my book clubs, we decide on a theme for the month and then each talk about the book we read. Our choices inspire great conversations and often end up on each other’s to-be-read lists. Our last theme was a favorite childhood book, so of course I chose this one which I wrote about in the early days of my blog. Here’s my earlier post about it. Note: the previous week I’d written about March, by Geraldine Brooks.

…………………………………

Before leaving the Transcendentalists, I wanted to reread this young adult book where I first heard about them.  I found it one cold, rainy day at Whippoorwill Girl Scout camp where—having escaped from the prescribed activities—I was poking around some bookshelves in a dark corner of the hall.  Behind some mildewed Readers Digest Condensed Books, I found one with corners of the cover frayed by mice and the pages brown-spotted with damp.  I hid behind a chair to read it and got through the first few chapters before being discovered by one of the leaders and told to put it back.

It took me almost two years to find the book again and finish it.  I couldn’t remember the title or the author’s name, only the story, and after a while I began to believe that I had dreamed it.  When I finally came across it on my local library’s shelves, I couldn’t believe it.  It was as though a fantasy had suddenly become real.

Ned and Nora live in a Gothic monstrosity of a house in Concord, Massachusetts, with their aunt and uncle.  Aunt Lily teaches piano lessons to support the family because Uncle Freddy—who used to be a famous scholar—has lost his mind and spends his days arguing with marble busts of Thoreau and Emerson.  The children have a run-in with a couple of town worthies who consider the house and the family a blot on their sacred soil and threaten to take it for unpaid taxes and burn it down.

The children discover a mysterious room at the top of the house with some dusty toys and two twin beds.  Confronting Aunt Lily, they learn that Lily and Freddy’s youngest sister and brother had gone missing from that room as children, followed by Lily’s sweetheart, Prince Krishna.  Ned and Nora decide to sleep in the room themselves.  However, in their dreams, they are plunged into magical adventures, adventures which turn dangerous.

There are a few books I read as a child whose images have become so ingrained in my thoughts that they have become part of my private mythology.  This is one of them.  It wasn’t until I was grown and had read Emerson and Thoreau for myself that I recognised that each adventure embodies one of the Transcendentalist ideas and images, such as the rough wooden harp they found while climbing in an elm tree, an aeolian harp, although it is not named in the book.  The wind blowing across the harp strings translated the voices of nature into sounds they could understand:  “ ‘These trees and stones are audible to me,’ ” as Uncle Freddy quoted Emerson.

The adventure that I think about most often, though, is the one where they go into a mirror and find two statues of each of them, a little older than their current age.  Ned and Nora separate, each choosing one of their statues.  Behind that one stand two more.  Their choices eventually lead them to statues of themselves as adults, at which point they are able to see if they have chosen wisely.  Unlike real life, though, they are able to go back and make different choices.

What was one of your favorite books as a child?

The Painter of Silence, by Georgina Harding

by

A sick and emaciated man collapses on the steps of a Romanian hospital in the town of Iași. He is deaf and mute and (we learn) has been since birth so is unable to communicate with anyone. A nurse named Safta recognises him as Augustin—Tinu for short—who shared her childhood on her parents’ estate Poiana. Although Tinu was the cook’s son and Safta the cherished daughter, they had a special bond. She encourages him to draw, as he did as a child, but at first he refuses.

It is the early 1950s and Stalin’s Russian holds the country in its grey and relentless grip. Yet, in trying to get through to Tinu, Safta begins to talk of their golden childhood, something she has refused to even think about for years.

She talks and talks, as do others who, unlike her, seem freed by knowing that he does not hear what they are saying. The theme of communication winds through the book. There is much that we, like Tinu, must intuit. Safta, too, must discern how best to help Tinu when he is released from the hospital.

Place and the social environment are important aspects of the story. The settings are described only briefly, yet come alive in the imagination. Here is the Poiana of their childhood:

The house at Poiana was imposing at first glance. There was its whiteness, the long neoclassical front, the pedimented porch and ranks of green-shuttered windows. It looked larger than it was because it was only one room deep. If a person came up the drive and looked in he might see right through the glimmer of glass to the garden beyond.

It was a place that light passed through, the light of successive windows thrown onto fine parquet floors in rooms that opened one on  to another, the doors of the rooms always open – save when great and irritated effort was made to close them during the coldest stretches of winter – since this was a house which people moved through freely, like the light: family, servants, visitors, villagers, who came on errands or to make a request or seek advice, the children of the house and the children of the servants. 

This is the novel I have been waiting for. Hoping for. It is quiet and asks much of the reader as it unfolds.

It is not that the language is gorgeous, though each sentence is remarkable in its elegant simplicity. It is not that the plot is thrilling, though terrible things happen and people must learn to live with them and with their own actions. It is not that the characters entertain us or steal our hearts, though we cannot help but walk with them as they move through a world that has changed beyond recognition. Yet it is a balm.

World Wars I and II destroyed a way of life that had seemed as though it would last forever. In England, it was the Victorian/Edwardian age, the age of empire; in Romania, it was the age of its birth as a relatively democratic constitutional monarchy. Romania had only become a country in 1859, gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. Siding with the Entente Powers in WWI, Romania grew and prospered during the inter-war period, a time of wealth and privilege for the great families and stability for those who served them. Initially neutral in WWII, Romania eventually allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary to protect themselves from Russia.

That war (WWII) is mostly offstage in Harding’s story. Tinu notices the refugees and later the troops before he is himself apprehended. He does not understand why these things are happening, why everything keeps changing. Far away in Iași Safta resolutely puts one foot in front of another, keeping her head down, working as a nurse. It is only when Tinu turns up that she begins to allow memories of her childhood to emerge and to reckon with all she has lost.

We may not all be suffering through a world war or see our country invaded by Stalin’s Russia, but we all understand loss. Eventually, we all experience what Jane Smiley called the Age of Grief. We all have lost paradises of some sort or another and have things we cannot speak of, except perhaps to someone who cannot hear.

I have always felt our civilisation to be tenuous and had nightmares about its eventual rupture. Perhaps that is a legacy of growing up in the shadow of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps all of us, no matter when we were born, carry a secret store of anxiety. Harding’s story places a gentle hand on that wound and reassures me that I’m not alone. It asks me to remember what has been lost, cherish what is beautiful, and watch out for one other.

Have you read a novel that you didn’t know you were looking for?

The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams

by

In 21st century London, Mallory works as a low-paid intern at Swansby’s, helping prepare their dictionary to be digitised. As the sole employee, she also must fend off threatening anonymous calls from a man angry about the dictionary’s newly inclusive definition of marriage.

When owner David Swansby finds a mountweazel—a non-existent word sometimes added to catch plagiarists—he  assigns Mallory to go through every single entry to verify that it is a real word. Mallory’s girlfriend Pip, a barista, decides to help, resulting in a fun version of Fictionary.

The absurdity of such a tedious task is increased by the fact that the last volume of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary was never finished; all the men working there went off to war in 1914 and the printing presses were melted down. Now David Swansby wants to preserve his family’s work by putting the existing volumes online and closing down his great-grandfather’s company.

Alternating with Mallory’s story is that of Peter Winceworth, a laborer in the trenches of Swansby’s in 1899. Socially inept, Peter is the butt of jokes from his co-workers. He has affected a lisp since his youth, perhaps out of boredom or to annoy his father, and now clings to it as his secret way of showing contempt for his tormentors. Of course, he has been assigned to the “S” section of the dictionary.

He has another secret way to assert himself: He has begun to insert his own words into the dictionary. Some are fun sniglets—words that don’t appear in any dictionary, but should—while others are more personal, such as “winceworthliness, (n.), the value of idle pursuit.”

As a confirmed logophile, I enjoyed the audacious and whimsical use of language here. The etymologies and definitions, both real and fake, are like candy to me, and the whole enterprise of determining real words from fake raises interesting questions. For example, when Swansby explains to Mallory that a mountweazel is “a made-up word”:

“All words are made up,” I said.

“That is true,” David Swansby replied, “and also not a useful contribution.”

The term refers to a fictitious entry in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia about Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer, deliberately placed as a copyright trap. Continuing the joke, there is actually a Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection which displays photos attributed to her, though a footnote acknowledges that “All the materials presented here as her works are authentic pieces created by other photographers, repurposed or collaged from media that are in the public domain.”

There are also some Easter-egg tributes to Lillian in this book. Don’t be put off by the mock-pompous preface about creating an ideal dictionary. Once past that and into the A-Z chapters, the story becomes a sprightly tale about two characters who hide themselves: Mallory who wants people to think she’s straight and Peter who shields his heart with lisps and lies. There’s occasional wordplay in the text as well, such as this from Peter on a park bench.

The best benchside exoticisms January could offer were all on show—the starling, the dandelion, the blown seeds and the birds skeining against the grey clouds, hazing it and mazing it, a featherlight kaleidoscope noon-damp and knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths, and wishful seeds . . .

Such language can overwhelm a story yet here it just seems part of the fun. The story itself is light, a mere trifle, despite a few dark moments. I’m eager now to read the author’s two short story collections.

What is your favorite made-up word?