Review by New York Times Review
Mysterious occurrences plague a Victorian teacher who moves in with two eerily well-mannered children. upon the death of her father, bookish, dowdy Eliza Caine answers an ad for a governess position at Gaudlin Hall, a rambling pile in the outer darkness of Victorian-era Norfolk. Eliza - totally alone in the world, her sole companions the protagonists of Dickens, her recent dreams filled with "dark graveyards THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED By John Boyne 291 pp. Other Press. Paper, $14.95. and irregular vistas" - seems primed for a richly horrifying experience. Arriving soaked to the bone and in the dead of night, the new governess of Gaudlin finds not the greeting of a warm fire and a noble family at its ease, but two eerily well-mannered children alone in an otherwise empty house. Well, not exactly alone. There is someone else there. Or something else. Or something like that. Throughout the course of "This House Is Haunted," John Boyne's eighth novel for adults, it is difficult to tell who or what is actually doing what to whom or what. Eliza is obviously and justifiably unsettled by the lack of parents. She is also cuffed by sudden gusts of wind, harassed by what feels like a pair of hands, puzzled by occasionally locked windows and sometimes rustling curtains. She's recently attended Charles Dickens's "devilish" reading of "The Signal-Man," so we know she doesn't scare easily. And yet Boyne handles this first part ably enough. He tips his hat to Dickens, patron saint of moral orphans, even offering that early cameo. He draws a picture of Eliza as a young woman without much imagination, forced to use her raisin-sharp wits to carve out a brand-new life in a difficult new place. Unanswered, and intriguing, questions abound. Who are these weird children, anyway? Who is the woman in the yard, the old man by the driveway? Just how tight-lipped can a villager get? Whence bloweth these highly selective winds? How mahoganied and manneraddled will the dialogue become? How many "answers came there none" and "I daresays" can be endured before we begin to search behind shrubbery and stonewalls for the "Masterpiece Theater" camera crew? Most important, will Eliza be able to unravel the mystery at the heart of Gaudlin Hall before it unravels her? The scene set, we readers should careen, hairs raised high, through the darkened rooms of Gaudlin Hall. The pages should turn themselves. That they don't is due not to a lack of ghostly fingers but to a lack of fun, and with it Boyne's seeming desire to qualify his ghoulish tale every step of the way. "I think any story which concerns itself with the afterlife and with forces that the human mind cannot truly understand risks disquiet for the reader," Eliza tells her father early on. Apparently Boyne feels the same. Gaudlin Hall is big, but not as big as she'd imagined it. Deep, dark secrets turn out to be only as deep and dark as one or two visits to the solicitor's office. The same goes for secret doors, which dependably appear when needed, dispelling fear rather than compounding it. There is so little here to frighten and preoccupy, in fact, that midway through the novel the reader's sense of suspense turns inward, away from the motivations of the young governess and toward the motivations of the author himself. If Boyne is trying to spin a frightening yarn, then why is it so thoroughly unfrightening? If, however, he is trying to give us a parody, then why does the humor in "This House Is Haunted" appear only as hairline cracks in the paint? Near the outset of Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," Catherine Morland asks Isabella Thorpe, "But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?" Although Catherine may initially doubt the bloodcurdling power of the novels her friend is feeding her, the macabre collection she reads, known collectively today as "The Northanger Horrids," are indeed dreadful enough to work upon her overheated imagination, twisting the prosaic world around her into high Gothic melodrama. "Northanger Abbey" is a satire of books like "The Castle of Wolfenbach" and "The Necromancer" - but while Austen pokes fun at them, she doesn't give up the chance to send a shiver down the reader's spine herself whenever she gets the chance, showing that by the time of her writing the Gothic as a genre was already so well defined that its stable of trusty chillers (lonely castles, mist-soaked moors, virginal maidens and cold, cruel noblemen with deep, dark secrets) could also get a laugh. surely the sturdy, time-tested plot at the center of "This House Is Haunted" has often shown itself to be a worthy trap door, pulling readers into terrifying, macabre worlds of decadence and decay. Add in some hackneyed nurses, though, maybe a little hot foreign blood and gouts of unrelenting, Downton-esque dialogue, and this book might also have been its own stiff form of hilarious. As Austen and others have proved, Gothic can be both wicked and winking. Unfortunately "This House Is Haunted" is neither. Or is it? It's a tantalizing idea. What if Boyne's novel is itself a Gothic manse, honeycombed with secret passages, occult symbolism and a subterranean river of terror, all there for the right lucky reader to stumble upon in the dead of night, candle raised? Indeed there are hints that Boyne is having more fun with his characters and their surroundings than we are. It is pointed out, mysteriously, that Cratchett, the recalcitrant solicitor's clerk, has never heard of Dickens, or the world-famous character who more or less bears his name. A visit to the village church yields up an unsettling fruit salad of scriptural warnings, mysterious footsteps and organ drones, which all seem to suggest something more locked beneath the surface of the story if only we had the right key. Alas, we don't, and the result is little more than occasional fog, characters as starchy and bloodless as scones, a mildly unfriendly house, ominously mild children, mildly reticent villagers and one thrillingly mild love frisson. The whole novel feels decorous and protective toward sweet, blunted Eliza Caine, who seems like a nice girl and someone who doesn't need any more problems, natural or supernatural, in her life. Such courtliness leaves the reader to wander the misty moor between terror and parody, uncertain as to whether we should be laughing with or at the author's own grim determination that nothing about the book should ever appear to have been written either in fright or in fun. We can only wonder what Catherine Morland would have thought. ? josh ritter is the author of the novel "Bright's Passage" and a singer-songwriter whose most recent album is "The Beast in Its Tracks."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Eliza Caine is orphaned at 21 when her father succumbs to the flu after he insisted on attending a reading by Charles Dickens in cold, wet weather. She is bereft and, like most heroines of the time, without resources. She has lost her home, and so she leaves her teaching job to take a position as governess to two children in Norfolk. The advertisement is somewhat irregular, but she summons her courage and travels to what should be her new life. But secrets and mysteries abound. There are no parents present, and no servants to speak of. No one will share any information, and terrible things keep happening. Isabella seems old beyond her years, while Eustace is sweet and lovable. Through dogged pursuit, Eliza ferrets out the horrific truth and survives the malevolence of the presence that haunts the house. As the fearful situation grows worse, Eliza finds a strength that is unexpected for her time and place. Does she solve the puzzle, and do she and the children survive? A perfect, shivery gothic tale.--Hoover, Danise Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1867 England, 21-year-old Eliza Caine is left completely alone in the world when her father suddenly takes ill and dies. In a fit of melancholia, she responds to an advertisement for a governess to care for a pair of children in the wilds of Norfolk. When she receives a positive response, Eliza realizes that her life is about to undergo a cataclysmic change: she has never been out of London, she has never been a governess, and she knows nothing about Gaudlin Hall-which turns out to be an imposing pile of a building, spine-chillingly odd, unsettling, and spooky-or her new employers. Drawing sometimes excessively on Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, and the works of Wilkie Collins and Dickens, Boyne (The House of Special Purpose) creates a subtle, satisfying tale of ghostly terror. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When Eliza Caine's father dies unexpectedly in 1867, Eliza is left on her own in London, and as a result, she impulsively answers a somewhat cryptic advertisement seeking a governess at Gaudlin Hall in Norfolk. However, before she ever sets foot in Gaudlin Hall, a mysterious force seems intent on harming her. Eliza's situation becomes even more baffling as she discovers that her two young charges, Isabella and Eustace, are living on their own in the manor house, their parents mysteriously absent. Everyone she meets wants nothing more than to avoid talking about Gaudlin Hall and its residents, present and past. The only thing that Eliza is certain of is that there is an entity in the house that wants her dead, and she must uncover the secrets of the house if she wants to protect the children and escape the fate of her predecessors. VERDICT While the title is rather uninspired, Boyne's (The Absolutist) latest work is anything but. In this tribute to the classic 19th-century ghost story, Boyne follows in the footsteps of his literary forebears as the novel invokes elements of Charles Dickens (who makes a guest appearance), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), and Henry James (The Turn of the Screw). With well-drawn characters and surprising twists, this book will appeal to fans of horror and historical fiction as well as anyone who likes a good ghost story.-Elisabeth Clark, West Florida P.L., Pensacola (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Standard gothic fare, from the frisson of cold hands on one's throat to creepy ghosts. It's 1867, and teacher and narrator Eliza Caine is grieving the recent death of her father. She rather impulsively decides to leave her position as a teacher of young girls in London and pursue a governess's position in Norfolk. The oddness begins when she finds out that the advert she'd responded to in the paper was placed by the previous governess rather than by the parents of the two children at Gaudlin Hall. When Eliza arrives, she finds two precocious children: 12-year-old Isabella and 8-year-old Eustace, both bright and both very strange. Eliza also discovers that there are no parents or guardians in sight, and the people in the village become downright uncomfortable when Eliza brings up this delicate topic. To her dismay, she also discovers that in the previous 12 months, she's been the sixth governess to tend the children. Gradually and reluctantly, a few acquaintances open up about the goings-on at Gaudlin Hall. Eliza discovers that the first governess, Miss Tomlin, had been brutally beaten by Santina, Isabella and Eustace's exotic and obsessed mother. In the same attack, she battered her husband beyond recognition, and in a bow to Jane Eyre--and for a time unknown to Eliza--the children's brutalized father is found to be still living at Gaudlin Hall, tended by an irascible nurse. Although Santina was executed for the murder, her spirit still roams the hall, interfering with Eliza's attempts to tend to her charges. Boyne saves a nice surprise for the last word of the novel, but otherwise, this is not edge-of-your-seat scary.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
