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?
