CHRISTINE PAICE The Word Ghost. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
Ghosts, poets and a passionate artist complicate 15-year-old Rebecca’s life in a quiet English village.
Rebecca Abraham Budde loves Jane Eyre, her family and Dave – not that she’s met him yet. Dave sits at the bus stop as she cycles by each morning and she loves him from afar until the day when, encouraged by her older sister, Maggie, she knocks on his door and asks for help with her maths homework. Dave tutors Rebecca over the summer, but their lessons come to an abrupt end when Dave’s mother discovers them studying something that more closely resembles biology. Soon, Rebecca’s vicar father, Robert, announces he has taken a posting in faraway Brightley, and Rebecca’s life crumbles. What will she do in Brightley, a village that doesn’t even have streetlights? What will she do without Dave?
In the strangely built Brightley vicarage, Rebecca chooses the only bedroom with a balcony, despite the latter’s close resemblance to a death trap. She dreams of a strange young man sitting by her bed and reading poetry to her:
… it was a good dream. One where you can fly or skim over the ground and you know everything is all right and there he sat, shining in the cold air, and I asked him again, What does that mean? My hand reached out to touch him, reaching for his shimmering light and he was so familiar, like the dreams where you know the person but they look different to how you remember them and he stretched his hand up to touch mine, all in a dream, all in a dream.
The man is Algernon Keats, second cousin to the Romantic poet and a previous resident of Rebecca’s bedroom. Algernon isn’t alone in his life after death: his sister, Augusta, is never far away, wordlessly begging Rebecca to let her into the bedroom, tap, tap, tapping at her window, despite Algie’s pleas to her to leave them alone – Rebecca is his. Through the Keats siblings, Rebecca discovers a secret world in which ghosts roam the village streets, and her brisk, terribly British neighbour, Flora Shillingham, has appointed herself their keeper.
She discovers, too, the handsome and dangerous – and much older – artist, Alex March, whose family is connected to Algie and Augusta’s through a thoroughly commonplace 19th-century tragedy. Rebecca is drawn to Alex March, intrigued by his interest in her and seeing in him a refuge from her broken heart, as Dave has taken up with another girl.
I picked up the knife all smeared with jam and cream and ran my finger down it before sticking it in my mouth. I wasn’t thinking. My stomach curled up into a tiny ball. I wanted to stab him in the neck but instead I placed the knife carefully back on the table.
Set against the backdrop of early 1970s political unrest in the United Kingdom, The Word Ghost is an engaging and amusing coming-of-age novel. Christine Paice, a poet, brings her love of words to the telling of Rebecca’s tale, entwining her everyday life with classic novels and poetry, and populating the village with people who resemble great literary characters. Rebecca is a perfectly judged teenage girl, passionate and obsessive, torn between the world inside her head – a world of desolate moors, poor governesses and ghostly poets – and the world outside, with its nagging parents, bothersome little sister and alluring older man. Paice has fun bringing Rebecca’s literary sensibilities to the fore: she has one-sided conversations with Jane Eyre, and Alex March is likened to Lord Byron. Lyrical descriptions of the village and its inhabitants paint evocative pictures and showcase the author’s skill with language: ‘small bursts of light exploded from inside [Algernon’s] coat, from his hair and eyes’; the ends of Augusta’s hair ‘curled and snaked’; and Flora, with her slicked back silver hair, looks like ‘[an] otter fresh from the water’.
However, the second half of the novel seems to lose momentum and Algernon and his sister, Augusta, take a back seat to Rebecca’s dealings with Alex. The novel is punctuated with Algernon’s poetry, which seems to declare his love for Rebecca but for all his obsessive writing in her journal, it is never quite clear what it is Algernon – and, in turn, Augusta – want from the living, or why it must be Rebecca who helps them. In the end, the mystery of the ghosts doesn’t quite come together, giving the novel a strange feeling of incompleteness, which is a shame, when the other aspects of Rebecca’s life are so finely portrayed.
Christine Paice The Word Ghost Allen & Unwin 2014 PB 368pp $29.99
Kylie Mason is a freelance book editor based in Sydney: www.kyliemmason.com
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