The Ghost of Gosswater by Lucy Strange

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. 

The Wolf Road by Richard Lambert

Cover: Holly Ovenden

‘The American tribes believe that the wolf can move between this world and the spirit world. That the Milky Way is the Wolf Road down which the first wolf travelled, and that when human beings killed the first wolf that was when death entered the world.’ (p 276)

There are many strong examples of the psychological thriller amongst contemporary adult literature. However, it is less common for a writer to bring this particular genre successfully to a YA audience. However, Richard Lambert does so here  with the same powerfully gripping compulsion and moving engagement as the very best of them.

Wolf death

As the genre demands, this is an intense book. It is often a harrowing one, too. Its language is taut and powerful with fractured sentences and repeated fragments often used to particularly striking effect. Its protagonist, Lucas, is hurtled (literally) into horrific tragedy within sentences of the opening, witnessing the gruesome death of both of his parents in a car crash.  His trauma is profound and its effects protracted, worked out in difficult relationships with a handful of other people, none of whom are themselves spared life’s pains, the best brittle and distant, the worst violently hostile. All of this is played out against a winter landscape portraying the Lake District, where Lucas has to live with his taciturn grandmother, at its most bleak and isolated. Then behind and through the whole narrative runs the wolf, both creature and metaphor, death and life, hunter and hunted. Above all the wolf is wilderness, glorious and cruel, vicious and gentle. It brought death to Lucas’s parents, can it bring life to their son? This narrative grips like a hand around the throat. It is one of those books that many will devour (and be devoured by) in a single sitting; if only because of a desperate need to breathe again. Not for the young, or indeed for the faint-hearted, it illuminates humanity by focusing on its contorted shadow. It is a masterclass in both writing and storytelling, and those who can live with it may never again live without it.

Richard Lambert’s is an unsentimental book, but not a cynical one. Although it is intensely bleak and troubling, it does, in the end, offer consolation and hope; close connections forged between individuals that may not be ideal, but are at least real.

‘Love - that difficult country, always at your back.’ (p 344)

Whilst not a tyger, this wolf burns bright in the fells of the night, and has a truly fearful symmetry.

Kindred beast 

There were several times when The Wolf Road reminded me of Janni Howker’s The Nature of the Beast from the 1980s. The two books share the haunting presence of a speculative wild beast, although in the case of the earlier title it is a big cat on the moors rather than a wolf on the fells.

Both are outstanding titles, and, in mentioning this parallel, I do not mean any diminution of the originality of either novel. Merely that those who, like me, enjoy comparing and contrasting books that share common themes, may be interested to seek out this earlier title too.

Knowable by its cover

The jacket of The Wolf Road, illustrated and designed by Holly Ovenden, is very striking and wonderfully apt; it is a pity that she is not given rather more acknowledgement that the minuscule credit on the back.