Some people like their art and their literature abstract, filled with metaphor and suggestion. I wish I could tell you that I was one of these cultured, educated people who can look at something that looks like nothing and see the meaning behind it and what it represents, but I’m afraid I can’t. I like to read straightforward stories and look at art whose subject matter is immediately obvious. I did manage to an A* in my art GCSE, but that has nothing to do with my ability to interpret anything and more to do with my first-class bluffing skills. Sorry Mr Valentine. All those research pages in my sketch book waxing lyrical about the artists I was inspired by and the deeper meaning of their paintings, and I didn’t believe a word of it. I just wanted to paint nice buildings. “So I guess you read a very convoluted book this week, Kate?”. You guess correct! Here goes…
The Silver family have lived in the house on the chalk cliffs of dover for generations. They love the house, and the house loves them… perhaps a little too much. After the sudden death of her mother Lily, Miranda Silver finds herself affected by the house, and the presences inside it. She starts to hear things, eat chalk and lose herself in the labyrinthine corridors of no. 29, Barton Road. Her twin brother Eliot and lover Ore desperately try to save her, but what the house wants, the house keeps…
I’ll be completely honest with you here – I’ve got no idea what was actually going on in this book. It’s a surrealist, abstract writing style that took some getting used to, but even once I got my head around it, I managed to only get the gist of the story, not the specifics. There are four POVs here – Miranda’s twin brother Eliot, her lover Ore, and the Silver House, all of which are first person narratives, and the fourth is a general third person narrative that centres around Miranda. None of the three first person POVs can be classed as particularly reliable narrators, but the entire book’s grip on reality was so hazy that it was almost impossible to tell what was actually happening and what was metaphorical, hallucinatory or just straight up imagined. Even the third person narration, which you would expect would allow you to step back and get a grip on things was vague at best.
The idea of having the house as a narrator is a cool concept which I did really like, but much like the other interesting concepts in this book, I don’t feel like it was explored enough. There are so many aspects that had buckets of potential – Miranda’s rare eating disorder pica which caused her to constantly consume inedible objects like chalk and plastic, the subtle hints of potential incest??, and the writing style which I am not clever enough to show an example of here, where one sentence or paragraph ends with the first word of the next
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of the main things that felt underutilised (did that work? It was hard!) were the supporting characters. Characters that seemed key to the story just sort of disappear, leaving me wondering what happened to them. What happened to Tijana and her cousin? How did Ore cope with it all? What the hell happened to Sade? Between the characters, the lack of follow through on intriguing plot points and the gradual loss of the avant-garde formatting and house perspective, I felt like Oyeyemi petered out a bit, constantly abandoning one idea for the next. In order to feel like I could even comprehensively write this review, I’ve had to read an explanation of the plot online. Now I get it, I think, but I’m still hungry (ha) for more explanation, more fleshing out. A lot of this issue could be linked to the fact that the book is less than 250 pages long (is that classed as a novella? Where does the distinction lie? I never know) and could have certainly benefitted from an extra hundred pages or two.
None of this is to say I didn’t like the book, I was keen to pick it up, I was just super confused. This is touted as a horror story, and I was certainly unsettled. Oyeyemi does very well at creating an atmosphere of unease and tension, and more than once I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. A haunted house story with a twist – when else have we ever gotten to hear the house’s side of the story? – it’s dark and creepy and deals with uncomfortable topics and has strong gothic horror vibes which I’m always in favour of. The characters were fascinating, and I particularly liked Ore – though I do want to point out to Picador the Publisher, that she is definitely Miranda’s lover, the blurb labels her as the “best friend” and it’s giving strong homophobic historian “these women lived together and were buried holding hands, they must have been really great friends” vibes. Although the side characters fates’ left me wanting, I felt the main plot finished well.
Objectively, this is a good book, it just wasn’t for me. If you like your stories rich in metaphor and imagery, with a unique voice then I would encourage you to check it out.
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