Boring Ghosts: The Small Hand by Susan Hill

REVIEW

Mysteries and Lamentations

The Pure in Heart: Simon Serrailler Crime Novel #2 by Susan Hill (2005):  Realistic in its depiction of a police search for a kidnapped child, often melodramatic and overly determined in its depiction of everything else: welcome to the world of Susan Hill's Detective-Chief-Inspector Simon Serrailler and the relatively small English cathedral town in which he works. This is an improvement on the first Serrailler novel, which featured an improbable serial killer doing unprecedented things for a serial killer and virtually no Simon Serrailler. Of course, more Simon Serrailler in this novel means more space to notice what a drip he is. Hill has labelled these novels 'crime novels' rather than mysteries or procedurals. That's mainly because the novels don't focus exclusively on the solving of a crime, but rather the effects of horrific events on everyone pulled into that crime. So if you like mysteries and family melodrama but don't like closure, this series may be for you. Lightly recommended.

The Unborn: written and directed by David Goyer; starring Odette Yustman (Casey), Gary Oldman (Rabbi Sendak), Cam Gigandet (Mark), Meagan Good (Romy), Idris Elba (Wyndham), and Jane Alexander (Sofi Kozma) (2009): Poor Odette Yustman has to spend the first half of this movie as a scantily clad victim who shows an awful lot of camel-toe in one scene. The cheesecake doesn't do the movie any favours. Writer-director David Goyer has actually fashioned a pretty interesting horror movie that uses Jewish legends to good effect. It also throws several startlingly distorted monsters at the viewer. 

Yustman does a good job with an occasionally thankless role. The movie would probably have benefited from not air-lifting Gary Oldman and Idris Elba in to play surprisingly small parts that might have been better served by character actors (the more rumpled and lived-in the character actor, the better). Still, this is a surprisingly good modern horror movie, especially from a major studio. It would actually be better if it were about a quarter-hour longer, so long as those fifteen minutes were spent on plot and character and scares and not more camel-toe. Lightly recommended.

Men Without Women

The Various Haunts of Men: Simon Serrailler #1  by Susan Hill (2004): Prior to reading this novel, I knew Susan Hill's work solely through The Woman in Black. That 1980's novel was a pitch-perfect tribute to 19th-century ghost stories. This novel is the first of seven DCI Simon Serrailler mysteries. It's very long. Very, very long. And while the development of the large cast keeps the reader guessing as to the identity of the serial killer in the English cathedral town of Lafferton for the first three-quarters of the novel, the last quarter of the novel disintegrates in what I think was meant to be a 'realistic' way. 

Unfortunately, two events that occur in the novel's closing pages have never, so far as I know, occurred in the history of the world. The effect feels cheap and unpleasant with the first shocking event and completely ridiculous with the second. And I was gripped enough by much of the novel that the denouement felt like the worst of cheats, one that will for now ensure I don't read another Simon Serrailler novel, or Susan Hill novel for that matter, until the bad taste is out of my brain. Not recommended.

The Descendants: adapted from the Kaui Hart Hemmings novel by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash; directed by Alexander Payne; starring George Clooney (Matt King), Shailene Woodley (Alexandra King), Amara Miller (Scottie King), Nick Krause (Sid), Beau Bridges (Cousin Hugh), Michael Ontkean (Cousin Milo), Robert Forster (Scott Thorson), and Matthew Lillard (Brian Speer) (2011): Winner of the Oscar for the Best Adapted Screenplay, The Descendants gives us George Clooney and director Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Sideways) in top form. Clooney's super power as a movie star is a grace note of vulnerability. Here, that vulnerability goes up to 11, and Clooney's performance is all the better for it. 

Payne has always had the knack of making rich people likable and closely observed drama imbued with sharp-witted melancholy and mirth. The performances are all fine, with special fineness in the  work of Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as Clooney's character's two daughters. The paradoxes of Hawaii become part of the narrative, with visuals doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to portraying the island-state as part urban sprawl, part natural wonderland, part bland suburb, and part tourist over-build. Highly recommended.

The Dead Marshes

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983): If you've seen the recent film adaptation starring Daniel Radcliffe, please note that the novel's plot bears only superficial similarities to that movie, as becomes obvious exactly one sentence into The Woman in Black.

The Woman in Black is a tremendous homage to ghost stories of the classical English type from the 19th and early 20th century. Hill's prose is pitch-perfect: it reads like an English ghost story from that time period, the prose as controlled as the subtly building narrative of horror. This is a novel of subtle, building horror which gives the reader both a haunted house and a haunted landscape and uses both to great effect.

With something of a nod to Great Expectations, it's the story of a callow youth told by his much older, wiser self. This ghost story owes debts to a lot of writers, perhaps M.R. James and Henry James most of all, though at points it seems closer to some of Edith Wharton's ghost-story nightmares. There's a chapter title that tips a hat to one of M.R. James' two most famous ghost stories, and a rumination by the narrator on the limits of natural courage when faced by the supernatural that's almost a direct quotation from an early 20th-century William Hope Hodgson story.

　
The young, early 20th-century English barrister whose older self narrates the novel is a sympathetic figure whose rationality is no match for what awaits him in a small English coastal town. Forever surrounded by salt marshes and the sea, the townspeople do not want to talk about the wealthy, elderly woman whose death has brought the narrator to them to settle the affairs of her estate. To do so, he has to spend time in Eel Marsh House (!), the woman's now-empty mansion, situated on a spur into the sea, cut off from land transportation with every high tide. And then there's the eponymous Woman in Black, whom the narrator first sees at his client's funeral and whom no one will answers questions about.

I won't say any more about the particulars of the story except to note that, like many traditional ghost stories, it's 'told' (by the narrator, that is) at Christmas, that its roots lie in the strictures imposed upon woman in Victorian society, and that the malevolence of the circumstances the narrator finds himself in are masterfully constructed. This is a short gem of a novel by any measure. Highly recommended.