Angelica

I love a good ghost story, but they are hard to find. Most books that are marketed as ghost stories turn out to be something else, and that is the case with Angelica, by Arthur Phillips, which turns out to be a psychological study of womanhood in Victorian England.

A pastiche of a Gothic thriller, similar in vein to The Yellow Wallpaper, Angelica concerns a small family in London. The wife, Constance, was an orphaned salesgirl who is wed to Joseph, an imperious vivisectionist of Italian extraction. Constance has one child, a four-year-old girl named Angelica, but has had many miscarriages, and is told that she risks her life to have more children. A doctor plainly tells her that she should resist her husband's advances.

The action kicks off when Joseph decides that at four, Angelica is too old to sleep in her parents' room and she is dispatched to her own nursery. Constance accepts this (a wife in those days couldn't disagree with their husbands) but is jittery about anything that may happen to her daughter. A series of apparitions of floating phantoms in the child's room has her engaging the services of a spiritualist.

The story is told in four parts, each from a different point of view--Constance, the spiritualist, Anne Montague, Joseph and an adult Angelica, who narrates the entire book. We see the major events of the book from different angles, which can be both fascinating (for example, we learn that we can trust nothing as the truth) and irritating, as we rehash scenes. I enjoyed the passages concerning Anne the best, as her arrival kick-started the book's soggy opening. A former actress, Anne is the most interesting character in the book.

Phillips seems to be a fan of old-time psychological thrillers, though this book is heavier on psychology and shorter on thrills. He writes in the florid style of the nineteenth century, and at times this seems close to parody. I doubt that a four-year-old child in any time period would have used the word "solatudory." The ending is also frustratingly vague, and makes us doubt everything we've already read. Ghost story? Not really.