Ghostwalk
by Rebecca Stott
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rebecca StottEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-06-03
ISBN: 0385521073
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Book Reviews of Ghostwalk
Book Review: Rebecca Stott - 'Ghostwalk'
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently bought a proof copy of `Ghostwalk' on ebay for something `ghostly' and entertaining to read over Christmas. Apparently, the novel doesn't appear in the bookshops until Spring. Did I get a surprise? Reading `Ghostwalk' is like suddenly opening a Pandora's Box or a cabinet of curiosities - fairs and rituals, Venetian glass, physic gardens, spinach cake, bodkins, prisms and Syrian soda are just some of the things which contribute to, author, Rebecca Stott's seamless, almost Coleridgean, weld of symbolism and realism, a world of thresholds, blurrings between sleeping and waking, the visible and invisible, between historical revenants and trendy achievers in the intellectual hothouse of contemporary Cambridge. The effect was wholly unexpected, and the range of the novel extraordinary.
The chemistry of light and prismatic colours which so fascinated Isaac Newton, the ghostly presence who dominates this tale, are transmitted to the very form and structure of the book as romance merges effortlessly into historical gothic, medical pathology into detective story and academic dissertation. The whole novel is itself a sequence of shimmering, elusive refractions and reflections.
While Lydia Brooke, a `ghost' writer, is completing a drowned author's unfinished treatise, and has her share of private and familiar spirits to cope with, contemporaneously, and beneath this wonderful narrative, other `ghosts' from the legacy of literature haunt Rebecca Stott, herself, as she fashions and assembles `Ghostwalk' - Shakespeare's Macbeth, Emily Bronte's Cathy and Heathcliff, Stoker's Van Helsing and the dark clothed puritans of Hawthorne's `Scarlet Letter'. Here, too, is Dickens, as well as Wilkie Collins, M.R.James and `Don't Look Now'.
`Ghostwalk' combines both violence and tenderness, beauty and fear. Its vital and alert prose style compellingly unfolds sinister political issues keeping its reader continually on the stretch, while some beautiful lyrical passages inform the author's natural observations and contribute to the subtle and understated eroticism of the love story.
This book is in some ways like a crystal ball into which we gaze. Often it isn't providing answers at all, but rather inviting us to exercise something like Keats's negative capability, to remain content, as he said, with `uncertainties, mysteries, doubts' while putting aside `any irritable reaching out after fact and reason'. This novel has to be read and re-read to yield perhaps even the half of its complement of secrets. There's no doubt that its publication will be an event of 2007.
John Gilroy
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