Book Review | Touched by Joanna Briscoe

Rowena Crale and her family have moved from London. They now live in a small English village in a cottage which seems to be resisting all attempts at renovation. Walls ooze damp, stains come through layers of wallpaper, celings sag, and strange noises—voices—emanate from empty rooms.

As Rowena struggles with the upheaval of builders while trying to be a dutiful wife and a good mother to her young children, her life starts to disintegrate.

And then, one by one, her daughters go missing...

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From the author of a selection of elegant bestsellers, not least the sensational Sleep With Me, comes a creepy period piece, positively drenched in dread, that documents an old-fashioned family’s decision to leave London for a crumbling cottage in the countryside.

For Rowena, mother and matriarch of the many and various Crales—including her dullard of a husband Douglas—the move is meant to demarcate a break from the bland patterns of the past, but from the first, the house seems set on rejecting its new tenants. A retaining wall can’t be broken through; a damp problem proves impossibly pervasive; and in the interim, “an impression she couldn’t pin down, that the house was already inhabited [...] overlaid with memories of all the years her mother-in-law had lived there,” (p11) eats away at Rowena.

It’ll be worth all the blood and sweat in the end, she tells herself. But that’s before her daughters start disappearing...

Numbers 2 and 3 The Farings were postcard cottages, age-softened and settled, with their deep-set windows and boxes of geraniums, their uneven floors and cool pantries, their small gardens tangles of mature flowers and shrubbery. The modern house in London had contained no soul, and little opportunity for her decorating dreams; The Farings, by contrast, possessed so much character, she found it hard to believe there weren’t other people there. That was why she was faintly nervy, she realised, imagining movement in other rooms, because it simply didn’t seem as though it was theirs yet. (p.29)

Initially, Rowena dismisses these feelings, insisting “it was her mind playing tricks, and she turned it off like a light switch,” (p.20) but they persist—and soon it seems one of her children is sensitive to them too. “This was Evangeline, who was dressed as a Victorian and had rain for hair. [...] She guttered in the others’ shining, blanked out by their shadows. Where the other Crales were clean with health and Jennifer was doll-beautiful, Evangeline was a grubby, transparent girl, dragging her feet and slipping away,” (p.6) quite literally latterly:

To explain the nature of Evangeline was difficult. Was she a backwards child? [...] Was she handicapped? A candidate for electroshock treatment? Evangeline did not fit easily into any category, and yet she was considered mentally subnormal by those who saw her slipping, murmuring, sliding through the village in her ghost frocks. The villagers had plenty to say to the police about Miss Evangeline Crale. (p.131)

But it’s as if she isn’t missed, in that no one other than Rowena really takes her disappearance seriously—and even she waits a few weeks before going to the police. It’s a whole other story when beautiful Jennifer follows in her inexplicable sister’s footsteps. Questions are asked and investigations urgently undertaken. The Pollards in particular are considered suspicious, but they’re practically friends of the family. They wouldn’t have hurt the girls, would they?

The trauma of all this turmoil is the ruination of Rowena. Her “dreams, already shattered, were irretrievable: it was the nightmare now that she fought.” (p.193) A nightmare that lives in The Farings with the remaining Crales...

Touched is a terrific little ghost story, to be sure—an exemplar of the short, smart shocks of horror Hammer-branded books have represented in recent years—but the narrative is not what makes it so special. Though it’s well handled on the whole, and very prettily written—Joanna Briscoe’s prose proved an unexpected pleasure—the twist the tale takes in its later stages is too transparently telegraphed to satisfy in the final summation, and there’s some unfortunate redundancy in the remainder.

Instead, what sets Touched apart are its central characters. Rowena is a brow-beaten broodmare—all too familiar a figure in Britain in the fifties and sixties—invested with such a sense of nervous energy that her eventual unravelling is essentially inevitable. Add to that unreliable protagonist a fantastic focal point for her frenzies in Evangeline, whose secret life—out of sight and out of mind—is superlatively rendered. 

Evangeline’s supposed disability is also deftly depicted, reflected as it is—if it is—by the harried or horrid reactions of others around her rather than her own entirely innocent idiosyncrasies:

Adults customarily shrank from her, ignored her, or addressed her like a simpleton. At her primary school, they had tied her to her chair to keep her in lessons, then tied her to another at lunch; but largely, she was allowed to disappear, and if people didn’t want her, such absences were her preference. (p.40)

It’s just a shame Evangeline is herself absent for such a large part of the narrative. Truth is, Touched is a touch less stimulating when she’s missing.

In a fascinating afterword, the author asserts that her “characters are all haunted by their pasts, their mistakes, their longings; pursued by guilt and desire so strong, it could infiltrate a life,” (p.242) and that’s clearly the case here, allowing anyone a way into Touched. To wit, this is an eminently accessible text, bolstered by a exquisitely composed story, but what makes it remarkable at the last is its juxtaposition of the genre’s foremost tropes—such as “houses in rebellion, secret rooms, figures glimpsed obliquely [and] unexplained smells” (ibid.)—with evils revealed to be markedly more mundane in nature.

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Touched
by Joanna Briscoe

UK Publication: July 2014, Hammer Horror

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Recommended and Related Reading

Guest Post | "Ghost Writer" by Joanna Briscoe

My novels are all haunted, but I was the last to know it. 

Luckily, others were more astute, and I was asked by Arrow to write a novella for their Hammer imprint—a collaboration between Hammer Films and Random House publishers that has resulted in some of the most interesting short novels of the last few years. I loved Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate and Helen Dunmore’s The Great Coat, but when I was commissioned to write a novel with a supernatural aspect, I hadn’t read them, or any other adult ghost novel apart from The Turn of the Screw.

Or I thought I hadn’t. When I stop to think about some of my favourite literature—AS Byatt’s Possession; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Rebecca; Jane Eyre—they are all pursued by ghosts in one way or another. And even more strangely, when I think about my own work, it is deeply haunted... While I was imagining howling apparitions in sheets, hauntings of a more subtle nature were staring me in the face. 

So in my first novel, Mothers and Other Lovers—which was in so many senses a classic rights-of-passage, semi-autobiographical first novel—I had plenty of ghosts to lay to rest! I think I had needed to look at childhood and my relationship with my mother, and how that had impacted on somewhat disastrous love life choices of that time... This is probably strictly the least haunted of my novels, but it was definitely about dealing with my demons. Several of them. Of course, straightforward autobiography rarely works as fiction, so it was a story, an invention, but I could never deny the true-to-life tale that had to get out.

My second, Skin, is the most shocking and in many ways worrying of my novels. It features a woman who is a victim of her own beauty and keeps having surgery to hold the years back. As each layer of her face is peeled away, more of her past is revealed. She herself is utterly haunted by her lost youth, and by her longing for one man who ultimately leaves her.

It’s that longing that really makes my novels haunted, I realise. I tend to write about obsessive, often dark and destructive yet highly addictive romantic or sexual desire, the longing itself more potent than the actual flawed relationship. In Sleep With Me, which was adapted by Andrew Davies as an ITV drama, the interloper, the unfathomable Sylvie, is frequently described as a ghost. In fact, the first line, which was used in the underground and train adverts, was "The day our child was conceived, someone else arrived. She was there as the cells fused, like a ghost."

The indications that I should write something more paranormal were screaming at me but still I didn’t notice! Reviewers even frequently described that novel as sinister, creepy, full of suspense, eerie, mesmerising and chilling... yet sometimes it still takes an outside eye to see what it is we should be doing.

My fourth novel, You, was all about a haunting of a different nature, though it was set in a large, creaking, thatched Devon house. In it, Cecilia is driven almost mad by the mistake she has made in the past in giving up a child for adoption. So haunted is she by it, she can almost think herself back into that time. In the meantime, the past is actually catching up with her in the form of that child, who has become a ghostly figure in her head but is actually all too real.

But this all took me to Touched, which is a finally novel that is decidedly and quite openly haunted! My first thought was a bright, bright—almost eerily bright—village green, and on that I saw a girl who dresses herself in Victorian clothes: shabby, faded, and decidedly odd. That was the starting point. Then I wondered about her mother, Rowena. Then I looked to her grandmother, and so the haunting began. In the meantime, Rowena, absolutely pursued by guilt, is developing her own very earthly passion for her intriguing neighbour, Gregory Dangerfield. Real life humans cause as many problems as the presences that haunt poor Rowena, while Rowena’s daughters have their own problems chasing them. And what is that face at the window, caught only in a split second film still? 

To me, with Touched, it was the perfection of the pretty village in which this family lives that was potentially eerie. And when they begin to attack the wall of their cottage to make a larger house, there is something not quite right going on, a sense of protest, of suffering. As ever, my characters are haunted by desire, longing, terrible guilt, and their past mistakes. But while they’re focusing on their own loves, lusts and shuddering regrets, less tangible apparitions gather in the margins. The spooks and spectres of the more plodding Victorian ghost stories don’t interest me, though there are some fine hauntings among them. It’s the presences that play while characters are looking elsewhere that get me: the glimpsed, the sensed, the loved. 

I think my ghosts have finally made their way out of the closet, and I look forward to sending them into the world, fully unformed.

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Joanna Briscoe is the author of Mothers and Other Lovers, Skin, You and the highly acclaimed Sleep With Me, which was published in eleven countries and adapted for ITV Drama by Andrew Davies. She spent her very early years in 'the village of the damned,' Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire, the location for the celebrated 1960 film based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckooks—and the inspiration, too, for this Hammer novella.

You can find out more about Joanna on her website, www.joannabriscoe.com, or on Twitter @JoannaBriscoe. Stay tuned to The Speculative Scotsman to read my review of Touched as soon as is humanly.