To see her is to know the vast terror that lies outside the circle of firelight, beyond man’s ideas. The curtain has been torn back, to reveal the gaping chasm in the world. Nothing endures. All is blackness. Horror. We are falling through the dark. We never cease. We never land. We drift in the endless void, suffering. There is no morning light. [loc. 2626]
Rawblood, Iris Villarca's sprawling ancestral home, has stood for centuries on Dartmoor. The house's name means 'the house by the bridge over flowing water': it's not nearly as gruesome or gory as it sounds. The Villarcas are bound to Rawblood, and vice versa. Iris' father tells her that Rawblood is 'written into' the Villarcas, as is a mysterious disease which he calls 'horror autotoxicus'. To avoid this disease, Iris must not have friends, or go among many people. She must live quietly and avoid strong feelings, to protect herself and those around her. Her childfriend companion, Tom Gilmore (whose father has a quiet, longstanding feud with the Villarcas), is appointed as her groom, so that she must treat him as a servant rather than a friend.
But Iris, fascinated by medicine and anatomy, gradually realises that the disease is a fiction, and demands to be told the truth. The tale Alonso Villarca tells, of a hereditary contagion -- a malevolent entity passed down in the blood -- seems eccentric to the point of madness. But then, he's an opiate addict, who takes his 'medicine' to protect himself from the force he refers to only as her.
This is a snowglobe of a novel: no way in, no way out. I reread it looking for the point where the evil, the curse, the illness begins, and couldn't find it. There are intimations, in the stupendous final scenes, that the bad things have been happening for a very long time. It's not just the Villarcas, not only Iris and Alonso, not limited to the voices that tell the story.
On rereading I also began to appreciate the deftness of the multiple narratives, and the distinctive voices that Ward chooses to tell the story. At first there is Iris, growing up at Rawblood in the years before the First World War. Then we have, from 1881, the diary entries of Charles Danforth, Alonso's friend and former lover, the man who made him an opium addict: twenty years after their parting, Charles visits his old friend to help with some rather gruesome medical experiments. (Caution: cruelty to animals in this section.) It's Charles who pens some of the most evocative, atmospheric descriptions of the countryside: "I could see England spread before me, in dense bright fields, bound by ancient hedgerows of rowan and hawthorn, in high bare moors and cushions of heather, in little cobbled towns where the mills still turn in the old way, and carts make their way to market in the morning under the early stars; in dark lakes and high peaks, where red kites circle..." [loc. 899]. And Charles, too, who is haunted by something terrible that he cannot write about with any clarity: who sees, and then cannot see (or forget), the fresh-dug grave beneath the cedar tree.
Back another generation to 1839, and a leisurely account of Mary Hopewell, despatched to Italy with a Miss Brigstocke for the sake of her health. She's consumptive, and has resigned herself to her death: but she finds herself strangely drawn to a mysterious Spanish nobleman, Don Villarca. Miss Brigstocke does not approve. And later, we have the first-person narrative of Meg Villarca, née Danforth, who marries Alonso after the death of her brother Charles. Meg, who's grown up in poverty amid brutal folk, is a witch. She has more agency than some of the other narrators, but perhaps not as much as she believes she has.
Iris' own narrative resurfaces throughout the novel: incarceration in an asylum, experimental medical treatments, return to Rawblood. It's impossible not to pity her. She is trapped by her heritage, by her home, and by the stories she has been told: the cave where she and Tom talked and kissed, the grave under the tree, the blood-borne contagion of her, the madness that runs in the Villarca line. (And possibly also in the Hopewells.)
I bought this book in 2016! I think I'm glad I waited to read it until now: it's a book that rewards calm consideration and leisurely rereading. (My rating rose from 3* to 5* after rereading.) Rawblood does very much make me want to go back to Dartmoor, which I love: and it does make me worry that, as in this novel and in Little Eve, Ward's new book The Last House on Needless Street (publication this week! [18 March 2021]) will include something horrible about eyes. I've pre-ordered, though: I'm certain that it will be a fascinating, immersive and unsettling read.
Fulfils the 'rural setting' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.
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