Boring Ghosts: The Small Hand by Susan Hill

REVIEW

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.

Screaming and Eels

The Woman in Black: adapted by Jane Goldman from the 1983 novel by Susan Hill; directed by James Watkins; starring Daniel Radcliffe (Arthur Kipps) and Ciaran Hinds (Daily) (2012): By all rights, this should be a movie about a young, early-20th-century British solicitor who travels to a small English sea-side town only to discover the town deserted, the residents all having moved to the United States, or perhaps even the Moon.

Given what's going on in the gloomy English east-coast town of Crythin Gifford, nobody would continue to live there. I don't care how good the fishing is. So one has to take this improbability and run with it, as one sometimes must when the devil vomits into one's tea-kettle.

Set just prior to World War One, The Woman in Black follows Daniel Radcliffe as that young solicitor, a widower whose wife died giving birth to their now-4-year-old son. Radcliffe isn't done any services by the early part of the film, during which he plays chronic grief as if it were chronic constipation.

He gets better as he's allowed to emote more, though he never seems to emote quite enough under the circumstances, which involve an isolated, supremely creepy mansion; children who keep committing "suicide" by jumping out windows, drinking lye, or lighting themselves on fire; a serial-child-killing ghost who enjoys screaming and sudden bursts of quick movement; a room full of creepy toys and an extremely disturbing rocking chair; and the tormented and occasionally screaming ghosts of dozens of dead children.

Both the movie and the novel it's based on are homages to something more literary than filmic -- the classic British ghost story as practiced by writers that include J. Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James. The mansion is the scariest character here, a marvel of set design, with the ghosts and the mise-en-scene coming a close second: a lot of the scares in the movie rely on something somewhat indistinct edging into the background before becoming more distinct and/or getting closer and closer...

Ciaran Hinds really has the only other role in this movie with any substantial lines, as a resident of the town who's been touched by tragedy but persists in not believing in ghosts. Also, he has a motor car that comes in handy towards the end. But would anyone be surprised that a place named Eel Marsh House is a bad place? Anyone? Recommended.