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The Ghost Orchid takes place in Bosco, a
Gothic mansion near the Hudson, adorned by a garden of grottoes, waterworks
and statues designed by a woman in mourning of her three children, in
the nineteenth century. In the present time, this mansion is used as
a retreat for writers who wants to find peace and inspiration. One
of them, Ellie Brooks, is researching the story of the house and its
former inhabitants. She is mostly interested in Corinth Blackwell, a
medium who came at the request of Aurora Latham, the mistress of the
place, to contact her dead children, and the resulting couple of
séances which ended up in tragedy, with the death of two people and
the disappearance of four others. The
narration alternates between the past and the present. As the tragic
events that took place in the past unfold, we notice that the
writers are more and more under the strange influence of this
haunted place, their behaviors being affected in different ways by
it, and progressively the numerous links between the past and the
present are revealed...
The Ghost Story is a carefully-plotted
story with a supernatural element, which in place reminds of The
Turn of the Screw. The problem I had with this story is the same
I had with
The Seduction of Water: both stories are carefully plotted,
leaving no loose thread or unanswered question. Carol Goodman has
done a lot of research around all the subjects relevant to her
novels (mediums, Indian remedies or again, Greek goddesses). She has
also managed to incorporate her husband's poetry nicely into the
plot (in fact, I suspect she build the story around these poems,
which I find all the more impressive). Carol Goodman strikes me as a
perfectionist who tends to every little details in her novel, but as
a result, the novel seems contrived. What I reproach Goodman's
novels in what I noted recently about a novel by Jeb Rubenfeld,
The Interpretation of Murder:
the lack of a spark. For all the effort she puts in her novel, her
characters never really come to life. There is no "gratuitous"
information in a Carol Goodman novel, and the characters, as a
result, appear as tabula rasa, only there to serve the story.
What are the individual stories of these writers ready to spend months in a
remote place to dedicate themselves to their writing? Do they have a
life? (unrelated to the place and events described in the novel) Are
they married? Do they have children? It is not that we especially
care about such details, but in the absence of such information,
they become two-dimensional characters, a device of the plot. For
instance, I am now reading a novel by Ruth Rendell, one of my
favorite authors. Most of the time, her writing is brilliant but
her plots can be lazy. But in each novel, good or "bad",
from the first pages, Rendell knows how to throw in details that
hook the reader. Only ten pages read and I am already hooked, not by the
plot, but by the characters and their particularities. This is what Carol
Goodman should aim for, in my opinion: to bring her characters to
life, to weave a story around characters, and not to devise her
characters to fit the plot. I am sure her writing would gain from
this, and reading them would be an even more riveting experience...
Rating:  
© Discussing Books, 24/07/2007 |
Critiques