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.