![the seance by john harwood the seance by john harwood](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/418ggW4Js1L._SL500_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-big,TopRight,35,-73_OU01_AA130_.jpg)
![the seance by john harwood the seance by john harwood](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qzoeNuGFUG4/Um1yR-h-Z3I/AAAAAAAABUw/1Punq2mUU10/s200/s%C3%A9ance+allemange.jpg)
It begins with Constance Langton, whose grief-stricken mother and indifferent father make her home life a miserable one.
The seance by john harwood series#
Instead of the present-day setting and single narrator of that novel, The Seance is set entirely in the Victorian era, and features a series of linked narratives. Harwood's second novel, The Seance, has obvious general similarities to The Ghost Writer, but is also profoundly different. No fan of the period ghost story or of historical family mysteries should miss The Ghost Writer, which is that rarity of rarities: a perfectly-crafted debut. The last two-fifths of the novel, in which a, abandoned mansion of the traditional variety makes a pleasantly spooky appearance, are the sort of thing that demands to be read in one sitting, and the final sequence, in which long-standing expectations are confirmed, manages to attain supernatural heights of eerieness despite superficially non-supernatural events. Nonetheless, Gerard is more than a hapless hero, and he combines other pieces of the puzzle as rapidly as the reader will. It must be said that certain aspects of the plot will become obvious to an attentive reader before Gerard begins to suspect them the book employs a particular device that can hardly be kept from raising audience suspicions (he said vaguely). It's not only V.H.'s reworking of personal history that causes those images, however unnatural and seemingly impossible coincidences will suggest to the attentive reader that some subtle supernatural force is at work, and make the ghost stories part of the larger narrative rather than entertaining diversions from it. In addition to being fine ghost stories in their own right, these pieces, which make up just under half the novel's length, capture the ways in which autobiography is transformed at a certain remove into fiction, and create a powerful set of recurring images. Suffice it to say that Gerard quickly discovers a connection between the fiction of V.
![the seance by john harwood the seance by john harwood](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ec/a7/25/eca7251f9c84b538667f5eac76227f48.jpg)
To give away too much of the plot would be to deny the reader the experience of its gradual unspooling. The novel's opening sequence, juxtaposing Gerard's experience of his hot, dry, insect-ridden Australian hometown with his image of the delicate beauty of the English countryside, amply demonstrates Harwood's gift for generating atmosphere on classicist terms, with simple but elegant images and without linguistic pyrotechnics. The Ghost Writer is the story of Gerard Freeman, the Australian son of an English mother whose dull life is enlivened by two things: his relationship-by-correspondence with a wheelchair-bound English girl named Alice, and his curiosity about his mother's past on the beautiful family estate she fled for reasons she refuses to elaborate. But in a way this is a false distinction, as the interplay between the levels of fiction creates much of the off-kilter mood that renders this superficially uneventful novel so compulsively readable. I begin with the stories inside the story because they are slightly more accomplished and resonant than the main narrative of The Ghost Writer. H." is no narrow pastiche of a particular style, but a voice all its own, credibly nineteenth century but with the timeless quality of all great ghostly fiction. In the final analysis, fictional author "V. James, but "The Gift of Flight" evolves into an allusive, suggestive psychological tale more reminiscent of the other James, or perhaps of other classical practitioners as Onions and de la Mare. Devotees of the nineteenth-century ghost tale will perhaps recognize in this passage the conversational tone and light social comedy of M. There are of course many industrious souls deep in concentration or copying busily, so that the dome seems to echo, at times, to the faint sound of a hundred nibs scratching in unison, but to a troubled mind that sound can too easily suggest the fingernails of prisoners clawing upon stone.So begins "The Gift of Flight," one of four stories within the story of John Harwood's debut novel The Ghost Writer. Others again lie sprawled in attitudes of abandoned despair or exhaustion, snoring away the hours with their heads pillowed upon priceless volumes until the attendants come to turn them out. Nor are ones fellow readers always the most desirable company, some being less than fastidious in matters of dress and personal cleanliness, whilst others, seemingly on the verge of madness, conduct whispered conversations with phantoms, or crouch motionless for an entire afternoon, glaring at the same unturned page. The reading room of the British Museum is not, I think, the first place in which most of us would seek refuge from a consuming grief, especially not in winter, when fog creeps into the great dome and hangs like a damp halo about the electric lamps.