I did not like this book, unfortunately.
This is a short book, a novella, about a couple whose young son, Ewan, has died recently. At first it appears to be a story of a couple trying to deal with their grief, in a creepy house on the moors, but it turns into a gothic sort of ghost story. We have Richard on one side, who is sceptical of his wife's belief that a seance can bring her some kind of peace after their son's death, and Juliette, who wants to believe that the ritual can do some good for her, for them both. There are also differing views on what happened with their son before he died, with Richard taking a more sensible approach to his wife, or so it seems.
Richard and Juliette also deal with their grief in very different ways - Juliette is cold, distant, cruel and bitter. She won't speak, she won't eat, she shuts herself up in her son's room and cries, and when she does speak to people she is cruel. I tried to sympathise with her situation, but her personality just did not allow me to like her at all. She has brief moments of normality, but those are so few and last for so little time that I ended up hating her. Richard, on the other hand, is pathetically weak - he lets his wife deal with her grief in her own way, and instead tries to explain away their son's strange behaviour before he died. He rationalises, and looks for explanations for everything, to the point where he is almost blind to everything else, much like his wife is blind to the sensible and rational. They are opposites.
To be fair, I did not care for either character. Nor did I care for Gordon, Harrie, Ewan, or Juliette's parents. All of them were just so abrasive, cruel, distant, or just plain idiotic. Ewan, though just a child, was only there through his father's memories of the days and months before his death, so we never really get a true sense of who he was, or what he felt.
The plot was nonsense, really. The wife believes her son is still around, and invites some people to do a kind of seance/ritual to bring peace to the house and to the couple. Richard thinks it is a con, Juliette thinks they are genuine. Alongside that, Richard is researching the history of the area and discovers drawings/carvings of an old tree that used to be on the property, and tries to dig up the land to find traces of the tree. The ending was really messed up, and I mean REALLY messed up, but it didn't really seem to conclude anything. There were lots of little side stories which were not tied up, and nothing was really resolved. It was too open-ended for me, really, and I like to have at least some kind of closure, or enough guidance that I'm not left scrambling to make sense of it all.
The writing was dark and atmospheric, quite beautiful really, and it does evoke the setting quite well - set up on the cold, dark moors, in a small rural village. I have to give the author points for the writing, as it's probably the only thing that kept me reading after I was so turned off by the horrid characters and weird plot.
Overall, I couldn't rate this more than one star, unfortunately. It was just not for me.
This is a short book, a novella, about a couple whose young son, Ewan, has died recently. At first it appears to be a story of a couple trying to deal with their grief, in a creepy house on the moors, but it turns into a gothic sort of ghost story. We have Richard on one side, who is sceptical of his wife's belief that a seance can bring her some kind of peace after their son's death, and Juliette, who wants to believe that the ritual can do some good for her, for them both. There are also differing views on what happened with their son before he died, with Richard taking a more sensible approach to his wife, or so it seems.
Richard and Juliette also deal with their grief in very different ways - Juliette is cold, distant, cruel and bitter. She won't speak, she won't eat, she shuts herself up in her son's room and cries, and when she does speak to people she is cruel. I tried to sympathise with her situation, but her personality just did not allow me to like her at all. She has brief moments of normality, but those are so few and last for so little time that I ended up hating her. Richard, on the other hand, is pathetically weak - he lets his wife deal with her grief in her own way, and instead tries to explain away their son's strange behaviour before he died. He rationalises, and looks for explanations for everything, to the point where he is almost blind to everything else, much like his wife is blind to the sensible and rational. They are opposites.
To be fair, I did not care for either character. Nor did I care for Gordon, Harrie, Ewan, or Juliette's parents. All of them were just so abrasive, cruel, distant, or just plain idiotic. Ewan, though just a child, was only there through his father's memories of the days and months before his death, so we never really get a true sense of who he was, or what he felt.
The plot was nonsense, really. The wife believes her son is still around, and invites some people to do a kind of seance/ritual to bring peace to the house and to the couple. Richard thinks it is a con, Juliette thinks they are genuine. Alongside that, Richard is researching the history of the area and discovers drawings/carvings of an old tree that used to be on the property, and tries to dig up the land to find traces of the tree. The ending was really messed up, and I mean REALLY messed up, but it didn't really seem to conclude anything. There were lots of little side stories which were not tied up, and nothing was really resolved. It was too open-ended for me, really, and I like to have at least some kind of closure, or enough guidance that I'm not left scrambling to make sense of it all.
The writing was dark and atmospheric, quite beautiful really, and it does evoke the setting quite well - set up on the cold, dark moors, in a small rural village. I have to give the author points for the writing, as it's probably the only thing that kept me reading after I was so turned off by the horrid characters and weird plot.
Overall, I couldn't rate this more than one star, unfortunately. It was just not for me.