Ghost stories: They're not just for children. In the late 19th century, before radio, television and film had usurped the public's imagination with committee-driven narratives, people relied on each other to keep amused, and one of the favorite Victorian pastimes was the ghost story.
In a time when s?ances were common and spiritualists even more so, even the lions of the literary world ? think Henry James and Edith Wharton ? viewed the ghost story as a worthy endeavor.
It's no wonder, then, that the prodigiously talented novelist Arthur Phillips has chosen to create a ghost story that not only takes place during the Victorian era, but one that seeks ? with resounding success ? to emulate that period's style.
In "Angelica," Phillips gives readers the sorry tale of the Bartons, a family being rent apart by ghosts, real or imagined. At the center is Constance, the formerly charming shop girl who, years earlier, improved her station in life in the only way possible for a woman of that era ? through marriage.
Joseph Barton is a medical man, with a respectable London address and a comfortable income ? and, it would seem, some secrets of his own. His insistence on the removal of their 4-year-old daughter Angelica from the marital bedroom precipitates the crisis that runs, unrelentingly, through the novel. No sooner does Angelica inhabit the downstairs nursery than bizarre happenings occur, from odd smells to cracks in the furniture to a malevolent "fetch," or ghostly presence, that hovers over the bed of the sleeping girl.
For most writers, ambiguity allows for multiple interpretations or an ending that refuses to be tied off in a neat package. Phillips, on the other hand, insists on ambiguity by granting each of the main characters his or her own fixed version of the harrowing events. What appears to be a ghostly emanation to the nerve-wracked Constance smells like nothing more than whiskey to her scientist husband.
It is impossible to know whose understanding of the experience is the "right" one, and it is precisely this built-in ambiguity that lifts the novel from a simple ghost story into a meditation on memory, childhood, relationships, society and even Freudian analysis.
"We are excavating muck without bedrock," bemoans one of the characters, trying to make sense of the "hauntings."
In the end, Phillips proves that it is the unknown, and unknowable, that remains the most terrifying of all.
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