In the Yorkshire winter of 1952 Isabel Carey is a young doctor’s wife, struggling to adjust to the realities of her new life. Alec is their skipper, the men all look to his lead, they’re young men, hoping to hell their luck holds – but they all know it’s bad luck to think that way. The novel opens with a prologue in which we meet a group of wartime air force men setting off on operations. Maybe searching for a rational explanation is the wrong way to read these kinds of novels, and maybe that’s why I don’t read that many. Admittedly I read it with a part of my mind working on finding a rational explanation – the over stimulated imagination and loneliness of a newly married young woman, haunted by her wartime adolescence the most likely. Still, a well written ghost story is a marvellous thing, and this is certainly a very well written ghost story. Now I am firmly in the ‘ghosts don’t exist – it’s all rubbish’ camp. The Greatcoat is a kind of ghost story – Helen Dunmore was apparently asked by Hammer to write a ghost story – and this is it. Helen Dunmore has become one of those writers I keep accidently forgetting about – and then each time I read one of her novels I find myself wondering why it is I haven’t read more of them, at the same time pleased that I still have a fair number to go.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |