Customer Reviews

Mysteries of Winterthurn

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Fascinating book, when one considers that Oates is writing in the early 1980s in a retrospective style and language. She completely hits the Victorian mark. Don't expect "easy reading"-- this one takes time and committment, but it's worth it. Elements of horror, romance, and historical interest are blended in a fairly balanced manner. The first tale in this 'trilogy' of sorts gets bogged down a bit with all of the Kilgarvan family trivia, but it is essential to the rest of the tales. Work through it. Xavier Kilgarvan is truly one of the most unique and engaging (and pitiful) characters of all the detective/mystery genre. The most impressive aspect of this novel is that Oates leaves mysteries as mysteries. Meaning, she does not rend the veil of mystery in some hackneyed (though at times clever) manner, like so many writers in this genre (Doyle). The supernaturally strange events in Winterthurn remain shrouded (and as you will see, justifiably so) even after extensive examination and "ratiocination" (Oates' word). In the end, the Truth (if there be such a thing) is left for us to speculate. The importance (and the fun) lies in the journey, not in an unattainable destination!

Oates has taken some vintage American crimes and fictionalized them to shed light on the true "mysteries of Winterthurn" : The attitudes towards class and gender which make the true culprits and events highly explicable to the reader, but not to the inhabitants of Winterthurn. The aristocratic inhabitants of Winterthurn (the poorer ones don't matter) are willfully blind to facts which conflict with their images of each other, which enables a vicious sex killer to operate with ease, or for a lady to get away with crimes which would have been detected quickly if commited by a poor woman. The poor can be hired, fired, scapegoated, raped, even murdered at will, and the parallels between their economic vulnerability and degradation, and their vulnerability to violence is deftly handled. Oates' description of Riviere du Loup, the working class community which Winterthurn uses as a refuge dump and as a place where any crime may be commited against the lower class inhabitants by the wealthy young men of Winterthurn, is chilling and plausible.

And for the record : Ms Oates didn't merely go back and take old crimes and recast them event-for-event with her own fictional characters in the roles of murderer, victim, witness...Instead, she takes elements from many different crimes and recombines them. Recognizing the famous cases adds to the pleasure of the book. Here are some of the famous crimes which she used in the plotting of "Winterthurn":

The Lizzie Borden case,
The Hall-Mills murder case, aka the minister and the choir singer,
The Thomas Piper "Bat Belfry Murders",
The Leo Frank tragedy,
and I believe I detect traces of
Mary Rogers,
Theodore Durrant, and
Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray.

The distancing effect of the archaic language helps to make it clear to the reader that the plight of the poor and downtrodden has changed little in the decades gone by. The language will add to some reader's pleasure ; others will find it off putting. It requires the reader to really think about the information s/he is being given, as the narrator is the 'incompetent omniscient' : A third person narrator who knows everything, including the most private thoughts of the characters, but who misses entirely the truth of the crimes and the motives of the actors. This makes the portrait of Erasmus Kilgarven, one of the most evil villians in modern American literature, all the more horrific.

My take on this last novel in Oates' Gothic trilogy - and Oates's self-proclaimed favourite of the three -diverges somewhat from the other four reviewers here. The other reviewers have covered well the aspects of the novel that reveal how disparagingly women were treated, and how the class-system in turn of the Twentieth Century America was so rigid so that one is compelled rather to call it a caste system, the social divisions are so strong, and the consequences of it so nearly unthinkable to the modern mind.

But what intrigued me from the very start was the narrator, who obtrudes himself from the very beginning in an "Editor's Note." At first, he seems to be a commonplace citizen of Winterthurn in the 1880s, with similar prejudices and anachronistic judgements and, most importantly, employing the lush, seductive archaic language of the time. It is only at the beginning of the third and last mystery that he reveals that he is a modern chronicler (i.e. late 20th Century) yet still employing this archaic language and holding these prejudices that seem so foreign. Indeed, to the modern mind, he gets almost everything wrong - from his dismissal of "Iphiginia" and her poems, so obviously modelled on Emily Dickinson, to his verdict on the last mystery, the Jekyll and Hyde nature of which and the obvious logical culprit even the reviewers here seem to have missed.

He's a self-proclaimed chronicler of factual events, supposedly relying on documents, yet assumes the omniscient perspective throughout the book. This contradiction is outrageously apparent in chapters such as "Quicksand" - probably my personal favourite of the book.

And the language! How wonderful and esoteric for logophiles such as myself, yet employed in a rather tedious way - the prime example being the use of "withal" and its contradictory meanings of "moreover" and "nevertheless" - sometimes employed four or five times in a single page, causing the reader to pause slightly each time to twig, by context, which one of these two meanings this wily narrator is signifying!

So what is a reader to make of all this? First, let me state here for the record that, contra Oates, I find the second novel in the trilogy, A Bloodsmoor Romance, to be the finest, most virtuosic of the three.

But, in assessing the disjointed, paludal, well, mess of these three mysteries, the seemingly obtuse throwback of a narrator, and his luxuriant, archaic stylism, my eye wanders back to the Editor's Note at the start of it all and the last sentence of it:

"Yet it were well for the contemporary reader to withhold judgment; and to reflect that our ancestors, though oft appearing less informed than ourselves, were perhaps far more sensitive, - nay, altogether more astute, in comprehending Evil."

And, well - Who knows? - Perhaps they were.

Yep, I read her saying just that.

The concluding book in the Gothic Trilogy, is really three novellas with the same main character, a young man whom we see rise from a schoolboy interested in criminology, to become the foremost detective of his time, the late 1800's.

The first story is set in the dreary, "Sleepy Hollow-like" hamlet of Winterthurn, in the bog country of upstate New York. In the man's family mansion, in a room locked from the inside, his cousin has been found near death and her infant son dead, covered with small bite marks. People begin to say the rather creepy Baroque "demon-cherubs" lining the walls as decoration came alive and attacked the couple. Did they? Can logic overcome superstition? Just what IS the answer?

Hint: it's gruesome stuff.

The next story is about the serial killing of several local factory girls. A Jewish accountant is blamed and the detective seeks to show it is really the flamboyant oldest son of a prominent local family who is doing it. It is a race against time since the locals want to lynch the Jewish man, held under light guard at the town jail.

The last story, set half a lifetime after the opening novella, features one of the beautiful female cousins in the first tale, who is found tied to a chair while her husband, an Episcopalian rector, is lying in front of her beaten to death on the rectory floor, with small paper hearts scattered all over his body.

Kinda grim, eh?

For lovers of authentic gothic fiction--not its pale modern descendant--the time spent reading Mysteries of Winterthurn will be time cherished. I recommend it without reservations. But fair warning, it is not for the faint of heart, or those whose attention spans cannot handle the demands of expertly measured prose.

The atmosphere of Mysteries of Winterthurn is that of twilight . Mystery and enigma seem to be the order of the day in the novel. Three murders are committed and Xavier the traditional detective starts the journey of identifying the perpetrators. While Xavier is shown throughout trying to resolve the mysteries and identify the killers, Oates is engaging the readers throughout the incidents and events in probing the reasons for the violence which claimed the lives of an innocent child in the first murder case, poor factory girls in the second case and a clergyman in the third. The typically Gothic question "who is the culprit?'' turns into the more difficult question `Why'. And in answering the question "why" the entire society is identified as the real culprit through its biased beliefs which see women, children and the poor as creatures of no human or social consequence.