“I don’t have an opinion about ghosts. It’s people I don’t believe in, I suppose.” [loc. 157]
Sarah Piper lives alone in London, eking out a precarious existence by taking whatever temporary jobs the agency offers. Her latest employer is Alistair Gellis, a wealthy war veteran in need of a female assistant: he is a researcher of ghosts, and his usual companion, Matthew Ryder, is away attending the birth of his sister's child. Besides, this particular case requires the presence of a woman, because the ghost of the servant girl Maddy Clare really doesn't like men.
Sarah accompanies Gellis to bucolic Waringstoke, where she discovers that she is unusually receptive to ghosts, and that Maddy Clare's ghost is real -- and utterly terrifying. Maddy was taken in by the Clare family as an adolescent: she came to the doorstep of Falmouth House one night, filthy and half-naked and bearing the marks of assault. Mrs Clare offered sanctuary, though her husband was never comfortable around Maddy -- but then something changed, and Maddy hanged herself in the barn. Sarah's task is to discover why Maddy killed herself, but the folk of Waringstoke are not wholly cooperative. And when Matthew Ryder shows up, initially resentful of Sarah's presence but gradually coming to respect her, things become more complicated.
Sarah's first-person narrative offered more commentary on the post-war roles of men ('You can’t imagine how hard it is to come home from hell and be expected to pick up the threads of a life') than on her own situation: I think her backstory -- the deaths of her parents, her loneliness in the big city -- could have been more integrated with the main plot. I wasn't wholly comfortable with her interactions with Matthew, either: she seemed to lack agency. Perhaps that passivity makes the novel more effective: there's an especially terrifying dream-pursuit through a dark forest, with a sense of malevolent presence and relentless pursuit. But there is also peril from the living, and all three ghost-hunters become targets.
Given the time in which The Haunting of Maddy Clare is set, I'd expected something more plainly connected with the Great War. Instead, it's that other war, the war in which women and children are cast as victims.
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