Cover and illustrations: Helen Crawford-White
‘I am midnight. Neither one day nor the next. Yesterday is behind me, and a new day is ahead. But right now there is only darkness . . .’ (p 148)
Strangely good
Lucy Strange has already made her mark in children’s fiction with two excellent novels, The Secret of Nightingale Wood and Our Castle by the Sea, but this, her third, is even better and fully confirms her place in the canon of the finest children’s literature.
When authors cite their literary influences, or share their own favourite authors from childhood, it can be difficult to detect those influences in their own work. But that does not apply here. Lucy Strange quotes the Brontës, Stevenson, Hodgson Burnett and Ransome as inspiration. The ghosts of Jane Eyre, David Balfour and Mary Lennox and Nancy Blackett certainly do haunt the periphery of this novel, never as actually present, or anything like, but as the merest echoes of an earlier existence, just occasionally caught out of the very corner of the mind’s eye. Even more, this new title brought to mind the later ‘romances’ of Eva Ibbotson, like The Star of Kazan. This is because, despite adopting the current vogue for present tense narration, The Ghost of Gosswater is good, old-fashioned storytelling. And I mean that as an enormous compliment. It sits within a fine tradition of fiction writing for children and is captivating escapism of the very highest order.
All in the mix
Although there is indeed a ghost, who plays a significant role in the narrative, this is not really a ghost story. Rather it is the most compelling of Romantic adventures. It has many features, archetypical of this genre, a young girl cheated out of her considerable inheritance; a dastardly older cousin, hell-bent on doing her down and aggrandising himself at her expense; a discovered friendship with a boy of ‘lowly status’; a father unjustly imprisoned; an eccentric recluse and a secret story of love tragically lost. And all is set against the equally Romantic and evocative setting of a Lake District conjured from imagination as much as from geography, which can therefore offer, in addition to fells and lakes, a rambling gothic mansion, a bleak mountain pass, its summit marked by a ram’s skull, and an eerie graveyard island.
The story’s central character, is rich and complex. She is both Lady Agatha, the child of Gosswater Hall, and farm girl, Aggie. She is full of anger and bitterness as well as of love and kindness. She is lost and lonely as much as she is fiercely brave. Like the geese she adopts into her care, she can be different things at the same time.
‘The geese huddle close, their warmth and softness surrounding me, keeping me safe. They can be soft and they can be fierce. It is possible to be more than one thing.’ (p 164)
This ambivalence adds to the story’s tension, and hence to its excitement.
All of these ingredients contribute to a quite wonderfully constructed narrative, that, interspersed with precious, if brief, lulls of warm positivity, rolls from one gripping crisis to the next, tension ever mounting as Aggie deals with one drama after another . Just as the reader’s passionate desire for everything to be alright grows almost desperate, things only get worse. And if , at the tale’s climax, events teeter on the brink of melodrama, then they provide breathless reading excitement in the process.
Great escape
Ultimately the story celebrates the triumph of goodness over malice, as all such tales should. It endorses the power of love, friendship and true family to see us through, whatever adversity may throw at us. These are values important to us all, and to our lives. Nonetheless, the essential value of a book like The Ghost of Gosswater is not to help its readers explore everyday reality. Quite the contrary; it provides a temporary, and perhaps very welcome, escape from it. But that is no bad thing. No bad thing at all. It offers a respite, a sanctuary that many children need in their lives, as a recovery that all need at some point, Lucy Strange’s book is a celebration of story, and the power of story to take us away from where we are. It is pure story. Not story as anything, except story as story. And, as such, it is something very special indeed.