An English Ghost Story

It's October, so it must be time for haunted house stories.  Kim Newman's An English Ghost Story offers up a variant drenched in idyllic nostalgia.  Our heroes, the Naremore family, are a vexed twenty-first century assortment of ex-punk rebels (the parents, Steven and Kirsten) accessorized by an unhappy adolescent (daughter Jordan) and an obessive military roleplayer (son Tim).  On the verge of a breakup, the Naremores exit urban London for life in the countryside, where they find "the Hollow," an ancient home that last belonged to Louise Teazle, author of a beloved series of children's books transparently set in that very spot.  London: hectic, cramped, rapidly transforming under capitalist pressure.  The Hollow: peaceful, spacious, a medieval relic.  (The Hollow's illusory edenic quality is, in part, thanks to the apples which dominate the scene.)  Despite its age, the Hollow promises salvation by erasing family history: "This was what they needed.  A new place, to start all over again, to build something.  Yet an old place, broken in by people, with mysteries and challenges, temptations and rewards" (loc. 112).  This fantasy--that a family in pain can simply be restarted, swept free of its accumulated history--is an error integral to the Gothic genre, which is filled with characters who yearn to bury the past, only to find that it persists in walking.  Newman's key innovation here is that the family brings the deadly ramifications of this error to the haunted house.  As in so many haunted house tales, terror erupts in the change from one house to the next; here, though, the problem is not that the family invades the home's space, but that the family's very nature transforms the initially caring home into something much more vicious.  The living people are Gothic; the ghosts, not so much.

In many ways, the novel's truest ghost is "Vron," Kirsten's old friend Veronica, whose wayward behavior as a woman in early middle age constitutes a different kind of haunting.  Vron is a tattooed Goth of sorts, dabbling in one thing or another--"the Wild Witch," Jordan calls her--whose influence has repeatedly disrupted the family in the past.  Most dangerously, Vron's irresponsibility when it comes to lovers, children, and friends represents the allure of complete, egotistical freedom.  Given to trendy enthusiasms, implicitly neglectful of her child, and possibly the overage seducer of Jordan's boyfriend, Vron embodies the ghost of adolescent rebellion--the childish things one must put away.  "No one ever really changes," she warns the Naremores at the end of the novel (loc. 4193), and that threat, even more than Vron herself, is the danger that really propels the novel's events.  

To be a family, the novel insists, is to change: in order to survive the Hollow, the characters must recognize that they exist as a growing, shifting unit, not as little atomized bodies of desire.  Despite their brief honeymoon in the Hollow, filled with childlike play (and, on the part of the adults, rather a lot of sex), the characters soon regress, or perhaps progress, to extreme forms of the behavior that got them in trouble in the first place.  Kirsty's straw feminist desire for self-realization--"[t]he daughter crisis diverted Kirsty from what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be" (loc. 1756)--leads her to reject her duty to care for others.  Steven's desires, by contrast, emerge in a parody of patriarchal power, as he takes charge of the family in order to save it: "I may have to be hard, make firm rulings you won't agree with, but you must believe me that it's all for the best" (loc. 2292).  Jordan tries to control both her own body and her boyfriend, Rick, in ways that suggest she resents adulthood (she fears her own developing physique) instead of embraces it; her brother imagines everything in terms of survival tactics, pitting him against his family instead of prompting him to defend it.  These drives toward selfish fulfillment and control are as much about the fear of others as they are about twenty-first century individualism.  The characters don't want to be vulnerable to the pains and sufferings and others; they want to live like Vron, who treats people like "toys" (loc. 4197).   

Thus the Hollow, whose ghosts vibrate in ultra-sympathy with the home's inhabitants.  As the multiple inset narratives suggest, living residents can engage warmly with the ghosts and live happily in return, or they can be angry and suffer horrible deaths instead.  It is here that the novel is, perhaps unintentionally, at its eeriest.  As I said at the beginning, An English Ghost Story seeps nostalgia: the Hollow is most closely associated with a children's author, whose books prompt fond memories of childhood happiness; those books in turn saved the sanity of a man kept hostage for many years; the house itself, far out in the countryside (a conventionally idyllic pastoral space, in other words), is a architectural hodgepodge of English styles from the Middle Ages to the modern.  Being content in the house requires that the characters abjure the rush of the modern world--Steven, after all, has to cut back on his business dealings at the end.  If Jordan, unlike Louise Teazle, ultimately decides that the Hollow "is not enough" (loc. 4230), nevertheless her family, to remain a family, must stay in the house and be trained to exist in sympathy.  The characters change, all right, but would they change if the ghosts were not there to force them into mindfulness?  The happy Hollow may be a carrot, but the horrors always remain as a stick.  "But not fighting was habit-forming," Jordan notices, "and the Hollow was supportive" (loc. 4219).  To have a loving traditional family, it appears, one still needs terror.