This House is Haunted by John Boyne
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book is available for spooky month!
pssst – spoiler alert – THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED!!
i made the mistake of reading blair’s review of this before trying to write my own. one, it is much better than anything i could attempt and two, she saw something in this book that i did not and it has kind of clouded my impressions and judgments of the book and made me think that maybe i missed the point.
here is a link to hers so you can read how it should be done:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/…
until i read hers, to my mind this was a perfectly serviceable gothic horror novel. the plot is the same as about 900 other books in this vein – a plain girl who is alone in the world takes a position as a governess in an unfamiliar place and finds herself in a big crumbling house full of secrets in a town full of people who seem quite inclined to gossip, just not with her. they stare at her with expressions both pitying and frightened, and always seem to be on the verge of revealing the truuuuth. the children she is meant to be watching (although she seems to leave them alone in the house quite a lot while she goes off on her attempts at fact-finding missions and such) are well-behaved but unusual with their knowing smirks and haunted eyes. naturally, the children’s parents are not present, for reasons no one seems willing to divulge. and what happened to the five previous governesses within the year before she arrived is just as mysterious. she begins to experience strange circumstances in the house which frequently imperil her and begins to think, you got it, “this house is haunted!” this is gothic lit 101.
i thought it was very typical and traditional, reminiscent of and referential to both jane eyre and turn of the screw. the characters trot out all the expected behaviors you find in the gothic novel genre: in-the-know characters who cut off their sentences right before they reveal too much, as though alarmed to find themselves speaking at all and the governess whose response to this is “well, guess i just won’t ask any more questions right now, lalala!”
all the props of the classic gothic are also lined up for inspection: secrets in the attic, multiple mysterious deaths, a cranky caretaker, ominous and escalating accidents which befall characters, secret passageways, dropped teacups, figures seen in windows who vanish without a trace, paling as a response to upsetting turns of conversation, spooky old-beyond their years children spouting ominous proclamations, and big closing sequences.
the outcome’s pretty predictable but the book is well-written enough to still be enjoyable even without the suspense you would likely feel if you had never read one of these before. i myself have read far too many to be surprised, but i thought it was a fine light entertainment.
but now – NOW – blair is making me rethink everything. she read this as a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the very conventions i am calling textbook and perfunctory. i think that is a very interesting reading of this book, and it really gives me pause, and her review makes me appreciate the book more. if that’s what he was doing, though, it wasn’t obvious enough. you really gotta call attention to it to make that joke work. because if that was indeed his intention, then blair’s the only one who got it. after reading her review, i decided to see if i was stupid, or if blair was a genius, and none of the other reviews i found, professional or regular-reader, interpreted this as a humorous send-up to the genre.
BUT IT IS SO MUCH BETTER WHEN YOU READ IT THAT WAY!!
because i did notice the comical number of times she called herself plain and and the light fantasies she entertained about the menfolk she encountered, but i wrote that off as a side effect of having been fairly sheltered and without prospects.
and i thought this was actually inconsistent with the way her character handled herself in the other, spookier situations. someone with that much of a romantic turn of mind seems unlikely to be so unimaginative when confronted with the spooky goings-on in the house, and so slow to put things together, so willing to shrug it off and continue as though nothing is amiss. which is, in itself, another convention of the genre. but as a humorous jab-at-genre, it works. and there are other situations miss blair pointed out where this reading holds up and makes the book more original and worthy. i kind of wish i had read this with blair’s eyes.
so, again – blair is a genius and knows how to read books so they are way better than when i read them my ownself.
humbled, bowing…
