This fascinating and gripping novel is a crime mystery with the emphasis on mystery. Contemporary to when it was first written in the 1970s, it also evokes a world outside time and the everyday norms of reality. The Blanchards, a couple consisting of the strangely hypnotic Giles and his fey medium wife, Fenella, move into Greenshards, a large beautiful village house where once a gruesome suicide took place. Next door live the Mintons: actress wife Megan, dry solicitor Edward, two children and Edward’s cousin Olive who gradually reveals herself to be far more than the dowdy and lame housekeeper. At an impromptu séance, Olive relives crucial memories of her father, whom she saw take his own life when they lived at Greenshards. She can no longer deny a growing occult connection between herself and Fenella and the power of Giles to draw her to him, even if it means inhabiting his wife’s body. The death of a child is the turning point that fractures the fascade of normality maintained by the Mintons. Olive is forced to confront long buried memories of a love affair and an illegitimate baby, and the whole family is no longer able to distinguish between criminal murder and occult possession.
The artistic power of this novel is in its expert handling of the possibilities
of madness, crime or the occult without foreclosing any of them. Olive’s life
is revealed to contain enough trauma to derange anyone without the meddling
of sinister Giles. Conversely, Megan holds to the theory that Giles and their
impassive servants, the Fenwicks, are skillful and murderous con artists. Yet,
she too is drawn into the horrifying occult explanation under savage blows of
a ‘killing’ fate. Does Olive ultimately stand for a daemonic force infusing
human lives and then moving on, never subject to death? At one point Megan calls
for Freudian analysis. Intriguingly she would do better to invoke C.G. Jung,
whose ideas are closer to the horrors that come to thin the barriers of reality
for all the Mintons. The reader gets the chance to decide what combination of
grief, belief and crime destroys this ultra bourgeois family. I found it utterly
absorbing and profoundly imaginative. What an excellent idea to re issue it
for a new audience!
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Susan Rowland
Clare Curzon is the author of the series featuring Superintendent Mike Yeadings.
There are seventeen books in the series.