by Boomert - The Seance by John Harwood 09 Jan 2010

The Séance (John Harwood, Jonathan Cape, $32.95 pb, ISBN 9780224081870, April) ****

This crisply written mystery is told in several sections, from three alternating points of view. Constance Langton, a young woman living in London in 1889, opens the narrative with a firstperson description of how she came to be involved in the world of ‘spiritualists’ and séances, in an effort to help her mother who has never got over the death of Constance’s baby sister years before. We then go back in time almost 20 years, to hear the narrative of John Montague, which details the mysterious goings on at the utterly sinister-sounding Wraxford Hall—the site of several unsolved deaths. By the time we reach the narrative of Eleanor Unwin, whose seeming psychic abilities threaten to destroy her life, we begin to have an inkling of how these first two stories are linked. With shades of Jane Eyre, a faint echo of Dickens and a touch of Agatha Christie, this is the perfect novel to curl up with on a wintery night. While the climax does not quite live up to the deftly handled preceding sections, there is much to be enjoyed here. A good recommendation for those who like to be very mildly spooked, enjoy 19th century novels or have a passing interest in the ‘spiritualist’ movement of the 1800s.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker