“Your story isn’t about spells and magic. It’s about sisters. When you focus on them, you are quite brilliant. Curses don’t belong to you, Mr. Calina. You should take them out of the story.”
“And leave them to you,” I said.
A nod. “I understand them better.”
“Why is that?”
“I’m under one,” she said, meeting my gaze. “Can’t you tell?” [p. 256]
Sixty years after the rainy summer holiday by the shores of Lake Geneva -- the venue for the famous ghost-story competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre -- another group of five passionate artists gathers at the villa. The famous writer Bayard Sonnier is there with his secretary, Giovanni Calina, who grew up in the slums of Bethnal Green but is hoping for Bayard's help and patronage. Descending on them comes a party of three: American sisters Adelaide and Louisa Wentworth, and Adelaide's lover, the poet Julian Estes.
Personally I would not like to spend a rainy weekend, much less a fortnight, with any of these people. Bayard is smug, self-indulgent and hypocritical; Calina (known as Vanni, one of the two narrative voices) is blind to how little Bayard thinks of him, and to how others view him as a way of getting close to his employer; Louisa is mercurial, selfish and immature; Julian is a laudanum addict, unfaithful to Adelaide (for whom he left his pregnant wife) and arrogant; and Adelaide, the other narrative voice and probably the most likeable of the protagonists, is deeply depressed after a miscarriage. (She was also accused of murdering Julian's wife Emily: I'm not sure we ever discover how Emily did die.) But this volatile gathering does provide a great deal of drama, some of it echoing incidents in the lives of Shelley and Byron's group.
I found this quite a harrowing read, because the dual viewpoints gave an overview of the situation which I don't think was available to any of the individuals caught up in it. I felt immense sympathy for Vanni and Adelaide, and wonder if I would have felt more kindly towards Louisa or Bayard if they'd been given voice. (Pretty sure I would not have liked Julian.) Adelaide, whose own writing has been suppressed by Julian's insistence that she's his muse, finds a friend -- and maybe more -- in Vanni; Vanni, meanwhile, is writing furiously, illicitly, both inspired by and fighting against Bayard.
It's gloriously Gothic, with mistaken identities, treachery, fearsome weather and a laudanum flask that's as much a symbol as an actuality. The codependence of the Wentworth sisters is horribly claustrophobic, and Vanni's resentment of the others' privileges is acutely sour. This really drew me in, and I'll read more by this author -- though I note I didn't have the same reaction to her earlier novel, Bone River, read last year.
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