You'll find a synopsis of this novel
here. (I still can't get the hang of this linking business).Setterfield's novel aims to be 'gothic'. It has all the elements - crumbling mansions, violence, incest, ghosts and a cast of characters who are feral, sick, psychologically damaged and plain mad.
Its time-setting is vaguely contemporary and the story takes place mainly on the Yorhire moors (where else?) and some sort of Mummerset around Banbury.
It tries very hard, but it doesn't work. Perhaps it's just too difficult to take this sort of tale out of its natural location in the early nineteenth century.
To her credit, Setterfield makes clear her debt to Jane Eyre in particular, and here is her main problem. Jane Eyre is not a gothic novel, mad wife in the attic notwithstanding. Its characters, for all their melodramatic characteristics, are real and we care about them. Setterfield's gallery of grotesques are as two-dimensional as the characters on a Cluedo board.
Mystery. There's plenty of mystery in this book. And if you like convolutions for their own sake, then you'll enjoy it. For my own part, the final revelations produced a sigh of 'So what?'
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