grieving
A favourite author revisited
Having struggled through A Year of Magical Thinking, I needed something gripping to refresh the parts literary prose simply doesn’t reach for me. And what better distraction than one of my favourite authors, Robert Goddard. I keep a row of his novels for just such moments of rescue.
As luck would have it, Set in Stone begins with reflections on a death! And instantly it resonates with me far more profoundly than Magical Thinking did. Anthony Sheridan’s wife Marina is found at the foot of a cliff not far from their home in Cornwall. The authorities question whether it was a suicide, but Tony knows Marina was in robust mental health and assumes she was so caught up in enjoying the flowers that she trod unwarily near the cliff edge. She was, after all, in her personal element, having recently moved to the house and the county of her choice and dreams. The prologue perfectly captures the mood and style:
I can’t see you, Marina. I can’t hear you… More than anything I love you. I will always love you. … It’s as simple and desolate as that. I don’t need to chase your ghost. It’s here, at every moment, beside me. It’s almost tangible. But not quite. You’ll always be just out of reach. I can’t touch you. Ever again.
But I can talk to you. And maybe, just maybe, you can listen. I wish I could tell you a different story, though. I wish I could tell you your death was just a single outbreak of meaningless misfortune. I wish I could wipe away the events it set in motion and have you back, alive and contented, to love and be loved. But wishing is all it comes to. It changes nothing. There is only one story I can tell you. And this is it.
And the book is written as if he’s speaking to her. It’s a powerful technique in the hands of a master.
Following Marina’s death, Tony is bereft. and instantly puts the house on the market, before going to stay with Lucy, Marina’s sister, and her husband Matt. He’s slightly taken aback by her likeness to Marina especially when she wears some of her sister’s favourite clothes. But he’s also intrigued by Otherways, the architect-designed circular house they have recently bought, with its own moat and lake, complete with a macabre history: a woman was murdered in the garden; her husband was hanged for the crime; and her brother-in-law defected to Russia after spying for them for years. What’s more, Lucy has recently befriended the now-elderly sister of the murdered woman who was herself briefly engaged to the spy.
Little by little Tony is drawn into the secrets and horrors of this house. The more he learns the deeper he gets into questioning everything related to it; even exactly how Marina died. She and Matt and Lucy were all keeping secrets he knew nothing of. His own personal life spirals into chaos. He has vivid dreams which subsequently mysteriously materialise in real life. When Matt goes off on business for a few days, he and Lucy, alone together in Otherways, are drawn together intimately as if this was always preordained. He forsees accidents and deaths. And he becomes increasingly conscious of a haunting feeling of other presences in this cursed house. Eventually, wracked with guilt, he leaves Otherways before Matt returns, but it doesn’t leave him, and he begins to follow up on links to its previous owners and their secrets with horrific consequences, putting his own as well as others’ lives in danger.
Goddard is a master at creating suspense and unravelling a multi-layered story. In this book he weaves together complex political intrigue, spine-chilling paranormal phenomena, and psychological depths that keep us guessing to the last page. Just whose version of events is the true one? A brilliant diversionary read.