The turn of the screw

I have John Peters's Speaking into the Air to thank for getting interested in the 19th c American pragmatist camp, so maybe it was inevitable that I'd think the first Henry James I've read was about communication. But I also do think that's the main thing going on in this story. Communication is variously too hard to do, too hard to prevent others from doing, an easy out to be avoided, and/or a mortal danger. Crucially (and again I don't think this is just because I've been writing about the under-coverage of class in Peters's media theory) it's always communication across class difference that causes real terror.

The prose style is, sometimes annoyingly but also compellingly, marked by long strings of short parenthetical phrases; it's often tough to parse, and it aids the impression that the narrator sees words/ideas as chess pieces that all have to be moved in just the right order. I'm curious to read more James and see if that style is particular to this story.

This is a ghost story written in 1898. The scariest thing about it is the prose. It's terrifying! Seriously. Stay away!

The thing is hard to untangle. It's written in an archaic writing style, with an excessively wordy backward sentence structure. If I hadn't been working so hard to understand the sentences, I probably would have been able to pay attention to the story.

It's about a governess who is hired by an absentee uncle to watch over his niece and nephew in a gothic house. No gothic house is complete without a ghost. This guy got a bargain when he bought this place. It has two ghosts!

This story commits one of the major sins that I occasionally see in books and (especially) movies. The governess can see the ghosts. The two kids can see the ghosts. They refuse to speak about it! They spend the whole book dancing around the elephant in the room. Who does this? No one! If Adolf Hitler moves into your spare room, do you think no one in the house would mention it? No! Especially if he leaves the bathroom a mess!

This is an unreadable, nonsensical vomitorium. Stay away.

I once (somewhere on Goodreads) observed that a lot of what is usually labelled Science Fiction is really Engineering Fiction. There are rare examples of Mathematics Fiction (e.g. Flatland, Abbott or Eon, Greg Bear). There's a lot of Physics Fiction and Biology Fiction. Le Guin wrote Anthropolgy Fiction. Imagine my surprise when recently in Ballard's autobiography he said that he favoured Psychology Fiction. This struck me as the perfect pithy description of what Ballard was doing most of the time in his short stories.

This collection has many interesting and surprising stories and the odd few that are actually predictable if you know his work fairly well. Many of the most memorable have the common setting of Vermillion Sands, a fading, no longer fashionable beach resort for the rich and famous that exists - somewhere. It's not quite our Earth, but not apparently an alien world, despite the flying rays that seem like they replace the gulls of most seashores. In fact it's the embodiment of a mood - a mood so effectively evoked that after reading several stories, I was able to guess we were back there from just the first paragraph of one story, confirmed in the next. This impressed upon me the level of writing skill on display.

Well, there's still a similarly brick-sized second volume to look forward to!

Thomas Hardy described James' sentences as "infinite." I thought, yeah right! That's good coming from you! Then I started reading what has to be one of the most famous ghost stories in the English language and found that if anything, Hardy was understating matters...

Having once got from the framing story to the main narrative, the reader is treated to the tale of a woman who can read not portentous but, with a random confusing clause put in just to keep you on your toes, moral and intentional depths, depths which - deep as they are - are not as vertiginous as they will be, when the next clause comes along just to tax your parsing skills, and the most divine beauties betray this to no others even though they have much greater, almost vastly superior, knowledge of the angelic orphans but these are merely working class servants who, however good-hearted, even saintly of spirit, they may be, cannot be relied upon because they are poorly educated, illiterate and hence stupid; surely unable to discern character accurately regardless of the extent or intimacy of the acquaintance - and indeed, these superb orphans have, it appears to the extra-ordinary perception of a narrator who sees ghosts in supremely mundane settings, come under the evil, it might not be too much to say infernal, influence of a couple whose crime is, not that they are working class but that they are working class and decline to humble themselves to the gentlefolk who by virtue of birth are intrinsically superior to them and would corrupt the precocious offspring into hideous crimes such as not liking their Governess or stealing a letter, thus precipitating a battle for the very souls of the narrator's young charges, a battle which, mercifully, progresses, in the last two fifths of the book, with, contrastingly, a canter, though never reaching a gallop and ending - abruptly.

The narrator isn't so much unreliable as completely looney tunes, by the way - at least, it's easier to believe that than take her word at face value.

James' control over mood and ability to prolong suspense is astonishing. One could endlessly construct theories as to what is really going on which is probably a big factor in the reputation of a story using elements that would usually cause it to be dismissed as "merely" genre fiction by the forgers of the canon. It's easy to over-dose early on - best to take it no more than one chapter at a time - but by the startling end it is impossible to deny the author's skill. This was a successful experiment and I shall dabble further in the James oeuvre.