Category: RIP Challenge

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman: Book Review

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

I finished Practical Magic a few days ago. It’s one that has been on my to-be-read shelves for some time, so it was good to read it. It’s a light easy read, about the Owens sisters, Sally and Gillian. I have to admit that one of my reasons for choosing this book in the first place is that my mother’s maiden name was Owens and her aunt was called Sally. The resemblance ends with the name as my Sally Owens was nothing like this Sally Owens.

Sally and Gillian were orphaned when they were very young and went to live with their eccentric, elderly aunts in New England. Generations of the Owens women have lived in the house for more than two hundred years and have a reputation as witches. Everything that goes wrong in the town is put down to them. Yet women come to their door at night looking for remedies, particularly for love potions. Sally and Gillian grow up and both move away from their aunts to make their own way. Gillian, the younger wayward sister, has lots of love affairs ending up with Jimmy. Sally, the sensible one, meanwhile has two daughters and is a widow. When Gillian lands up on her doorstep with a dead Jimmy in the car, Sally’s life is turned upside down as she tries to cope with the situation. In the end it is the aunts who are called upon for help.

This is the first book by Alice Hoffman that I’ve read and whilst I thought it was OK I shan’t be rushing out to find more of her books. It has the feel of a fairy tale, mixed up with reality which I liked. There was enough suspense to keep me wondering how it would end and I liked how the characters interacted – Sally and Gillian were both well-drawn. I wasn’t that keen on the love stories, which seemed to be of the type of instant attraction with disastrous consequences. Interestingly, for me at any rate, I didn’t mind that it’s written in the present tense, most of the time I didn’t even notice it.

I didn’t identify this as a book for the RIP Challenge, but it fits in well, I think.

RIP Challenge

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

It’s time for Carl’s R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge. This challenge runs from 1 September to 31 October. As he describes it, it’s that time of the year

where two short months are dedicated to reveling in all things creepy, eerie, mysterious, gothic, horrifying, suspenseful and strange.

It is time to celebrate things that go bump in the night; that favorite detective that always gets his man, or woman, in the end; that delicious chill of a creak on the stairs, of the rogue waiting in the dark, of the full moon and the flit of bats wings.

The categories of books to choose from are:

Mystery.
Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

There are a number of Perils, but I’m going for the easy one – Peril the Third, which involves reading one book that fits within the R.I.P. definition.

I have a few books to choose from as I don’t like to commit myself too soon. These are from my TBR list. If I read more than one that it is all the better:

(The links go to Amazon.co.uk)

R.I.P.III Challenge Completed

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Carl’s R.I.P. Challenge ended yesterday and I completed it, finishing four books for Peril the First.

I picked a long list to choose from and read two books from my original list and added two more. The four books I read are (click on the title to read my review):

 

My favourite book has to be The Gravedigger’s Daughter.

They’re all very different books and vary in the amount of “peril” they contain. None of them are scary. Chocky has a definite supernatural element; the others are full of suspense. There’s a fair amount of horror in The Gravediggger’s Daughter ; The House on the Strand is dark fantasy; and Tales of Terror are suitably gothic and dark.

I didn’t get to the other books on my list during the Challenge, but they are all books I hope to read before long:

  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – I’™ve been meaning to read this for ages.
  • The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly – apparently creepy and disturbing.
  • The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeir – a mystery surrounding the afterlife.
  • The Collector by John Fowles – haunting and darkly melancholic.
  • The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks – macbre and bizarre.
  • Not Dead Enough by Peter James – murder and deception.

Tales of Terror

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Body Snatcher and Olalla are two short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson included in my copy of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a Penguin Classic. Both stories were written for the Christmas “crawler” tradition in 1884 and 1885. Christmas was a season traditionally associated with supernatural and creepy tales. In the introduction to the book, the editor, Robert Mighall explains that a “crawler” was a ‘sensational tale of a supernatural incident designed to produce a pleasurable thrill in its readers.’

The Body Snatcher is very much a traditional Christmas ghost story, beginning with four men gathered in an inn on a dark winter’s night telling tales round the fireside of grisly deeds. On this particular night Fettes, the local drunk, is roused from his stupor  as if “arisen from the dead” when he hears the name ‘Dr Macfalane’. What follows is the tale of their relationship in the past when they were both medical students. The title of this story of course gives the game away and it is based on the activities of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in the 1820s, body snatchers who turned out to be murderers selling bodies that had never been buried. I didn’t find this story to be very chilling or thrilling, although I didn’t predict the slight twist at the end. The interest for me is in the two personalities of Fettes and Macfarlane and how the turn of events affected their lives. Macfaarlane had gone on to be a successful and wealthy doctor, untroubled by his conscience, and

richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and whitest of linen, with a great gold watch chain and studs and spectacles of the same precious metal; he wore a broad folded tie , white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving coat of fur.

Whereas Fettes overcome by his conscience had lived in idleness, pursuing

“crapulous, disreputable vices”. Permanently in a “state of melancholy, alcoholic saturation”, a “parlour sot, bald, dirty, pimpled and robed in his old camlet cloak”.

Olalla is a longer story and to my mind is the better of the two. When does a short story cease to be considered short, I wonder? It is definitely written as a Gothic tale, set in an ancient Spanish castle surrounded by deep woodland, about a young man recovering from his war wounds and to “renew his blood”, who finds himself living with a strange family. The castle is as much a character in this story as the people, fallen into disrepair as much as the family has degenerated from its noble ancestors who fell prey to evil.

The young man, naturally, falls in love with Olalla, the beautiful daughter, with a strange mad mother and a simpleton brother.  She fears she has inherited the evil of her ancestors and the hint of vampirism in her mother. There is almost a fairytale feel to this story with references to Sleeping Beauty locked by magic within the castle, and also a chill factor which Bram Stoker later developed in Dracula.

This completes my reading for the RIP Challenge, although I have several more books that I would like to read such as The Turn of the Screw. Thanks to Carl for hosting the Challenge.

A Real or An Imaginary Friend?

Published on by Margaret

Chocky by John Wyndham qualifies for the RIP Challenge in the Supernatural category. It seems at first as though Matthew has an invisible friend, just like his little sister’s Piff, who appeared when Polly was about five. Matthew at eleven seemed a little bit old for such a friend, and when his father overhears him having what seems like a one-sided conversation he becomes worried. It all becomes more puzzling when Matthew starts asking unusual questions about physics and maths and starts to do things he couldn’t do before.  When Matthew becomes ill he can’t keep his secret any longer and running a high temperature he asks his mother to tell Chocky to go away and stop asking him questions. Just who Chocky is and where is he/she from, and indeed what gender  Chocky is, is all most mysterious.

Matthew who can’t swim, saves his sister from drowning, much to everyone’s astonishment. Does he have a “Guardian Angel”? He suddenly starts painting in a most unusual style and it appears that he is “possessed”.  On the face of it this is a simple story and told in an innocent, almost facile style. But every now and then philosophical questions are thrown into the story as Matthew’s parents discuss the problem. Mary, his mother reflects on reality:

Reality is relative. Devils, evil spirits, witches and so on become real enough to the people who believed in them. Just as God is to people who believe in him. When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant.

 She wonders if they dealing with the problem in the right way. Is Matthew mentally ill? Eventually they get professional help from Landis who specialises in mental disorders. Landis is baffled and says it has him beat:

More than anything I’ve come across it resembles what our unscientific ancestors used to consider a case of “possession”. They would have claimed quite simply that this Chocky is a wandering, if not a wanton, spirit which has invaded Matthew.”

But Chocky is not malevolent. It appears sometimes as though John Wyndham, writing in 1968, is using this book as a means of stating his criticsm of the state of technology and the use that was being made of scientific advances, such as atomic power. Chocky tells Matthew’s father:

You have not done badly with electricity in a hundred years. And you did quite well with steam in quite a short time. But all that is so cumbersome, so inefficient. And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion – dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous …

Chocky is convinced that resources are being squandered. At the end of the book it does come over as a lecture for finding and developing new sources of energy, of gaining access to an infinite power supply.

Chocky advocates that she/he contacted Matthew because young minds are disposed to accepting the improbable because

they have absorbed so much that is unlikely and inexplicable from myths, legends, fairy-stories, and religion, that they are disposed to accept the improbable with little question, providing it is not alarming. Older minds, on the other hand, have formed rigid conceptions of probability, and are very frightened by any attempt at contact: they usually think they must be going mad, which interferes with rapport.

I liked this strange little book, although it is now a bit dated, and I had little difficulty in accepting its reality ( after all, I have read many myths, legends and fairy tales). One other topic I found interesting is the view put forward that women have “a compulsion” to “produce a baby as soon as possible after marriage” and that this is not just a biological urge but also a response to pressure to conform with other people’s expectations and the

“desire to prove that one is normal, the belief that it will establish status, a sense of personal achievement, the symbol of one’s maturity, a feeling of solidarity, the obligation of holding one’s own in competition with the neighbours. … It is not the least use pointing out that some of the world’s most influential women, Elizabeth the First, Florence Nightingale, for instance, would actually have lost status, had they become mums, in fact it is much wiser not to try. Babies, in a world that already has far too many, remain desirable.”

On one hand it seems as though John Wyndham was being rather condescending but on the other as though he was advocating feminism. Matthew is adopted and Mary’s sisters do think of her as inferior until Polly is born.  So there are also some reflections on the difficulties of adoption and its effect on children. Until Polly was born Mary felt that she was not a real mother – she had the impression that “some babies confer a little more equality than other babies”. 

I liked this mixture of story with its gentle sci-fi theme and its social and philosophical reflections. All of which was different from Chocky, a children’s TV series of the 1980s which I remembered watching. I found this great site – Little Gems – which contains lots of information on children’s TV shows and films of years gone by, including Chocky. If you have time on your hands and fancy enjoying a bit of nostalgia I can recommend Little Gems. 

Final Thoughts about The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Gravedigger's DaughterI finished The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates last week and parts of it have remained in my mind. Mainly I think it’s the general atmosphere of its world. It’s a grim, dark world, a violent and pessimistic world, gothic and grotesque. In some ways it reminds me of Hardy’s novels – you know something terrible will happen whatever the characters do to try to avert tragedy.

The main character is Rebecca Schwart, born in New York Harbor, the daughter of Jacob and Anna escaping from Nazi Germany in 1936. They live a life of abject poverty whilst Jacob can only find work as a caretaker of Milburn Cemetery, a non-demoninational cemetery at the edge of the town. A rent-free “cottage”, which is a stone hovel of four cramped rooms,  goes with the job. Jacob, once a maths teacher is reduced to a troll-like figure, harassed and tormented by schoolboys and young men: “Gravedigger! Kraut! Nazi! Jew!”.

It’s this first section of the book recounting Rebecca’s childhood that has stayed with me; the effect of the suppressed anger, prejudice and resentment on the whole family. Her mother Anna, retreats into a world of her own, hiding away from other people “the outsiders”. It’s only through through listening to music on Jacob’s radio when he is out of the house that she can communicate with Rebecca. Briefly the family have their hopes raised with the news that Anna’s sister and family are fleeing Germany and will come to live with them. Rebecca is excited and entranced by thoughts of her cousin Freyda and imagines playing with her, whilst Anna does her best to ‘fix-up’ the cottage. Alas, they never arrive. Jacob is sickened by his inability to protect his daughter and exhorts her to hide her weakness:

He told her solemnly as if she were of a age to understand such words, “Humanity is fearful of death, you see. So they make jokes about it. In me, they see a servant of death. In you, the daughter of such a one. But they do not know us Rebecca. Not you, and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us.”

Eventually, Jacob’s rage at his desperate life erupts into violence and life is never the same for Rebecca and her brothers.

More violence and despair follow as Rebecca falls in love with Niles Tigor, a man whose moods alternate wildly, one moment tender and passionate towards Rebecca and then cruelly indifferent and brutally agressive. Rebecca has a miscarriage, brought by Niles’s violent attack. She stays with him until she can no longer bear his cruelty and in fear of her life and that of her son Niley she turns on him and flees thinking she may have killed him.

The third section of the book follows her life with Chet, his desire to marry her and her increasing anxiety and fear that Niles will discover where she is. Chet is a musician and helps Niles to become a pianist. Chet is from a wealthy family in contrast to Rebecca, now Hazel and she lives a life of luxury, still haunted by the fear of Niles. Music is a motif that runs through the book. Niley has inherited his musical talent from Anna, who used to play in the ‘old country’ and stifled by Jacob she still listened secretly to music on the radio and introduced Rebecca to Beethoven’s Appassionata; a memory that Rebecca cherished throughout her life, culminating in Niley’s triumphant performance of the sonata. I read the account of his performance with increasing tension as Hazel (Rebecca) can hardly breathe in her dread of a catastrophe.

History and how we perceive it is a thread running through the book. Here are two quotes that struck me:

History has no existence. All that exists are individuals, and of these, only individual moments as broken off from one another as shattered vetebrae.

and

History is an invention of books. In biological anthropology we note that the wish to perceive “meaning” is one trait of our species among many. But that does not posit “meaning” in the world. If history did exist it is a great river/cesspool into which countless small streams and tributaries flow. In one direction. Unlike sewage it cannot back up. It cannot be “tested” – “demonstrated”. It simply is. If the river dries up, the river disappears. There is no “river-destiny”. There are merely accidents in time.

But it’s the final section for me that stands up to the story of Rebecca’s childhood and in some ways completes the story. And yet …

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so I’ll just say the ending did surprise me and touched me enormously. It made a great ending for this melodramatic and memorable book. There is an interview with Joyce Carol Oates at the back of the book and I was not surprised to read that this part of the book had the power to bring tears to her eyes, even though she had written it herself. It brought tears to my eyes too. The favourite parts of the book for her included the scenes in the gravedigger’s house and the exchanges between the father and his children, which I think are very powerful.

I’ve also written about this book here and here. It qualifies for my second book for the RIP III Challenge.