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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Old Dark House, June 1, 2008
It is sometimes remarked that inanimate objects can have such a strong presence within a story that the object almost becomes one of the characters. I think this is certainly true of the sinister Wraxford Hall. This crumbling manor house has accrued its reputation down the years thanks to its eccentric inhabitants and its location. Its spooky setting amidst overgrown grounds and the surrounding sprawl of woodlands, known as Monks Wood, has caused the local poachers to pursue their game elsewhere. A pack of vicious hounds is said to roam the area and the ghost of a monk is believed to haunt the woods. Anyone who sees the specter is reputed to die within the month. `The Seance' is John Harwood's second novel and is set in Victorian England. Events unfold through pages of narrative seen from the perspectives of three of the story's main characters: Constance Langton, John Montague and Eleanor Unwin. Constance's distraught mother is inconsolable following the death of Constance's sister. In desperation, Constance and her mother attend a seance in the hope of providing some much needed comfort. John Montague is a barrister and amateur artist who is charged with tracing the heir of Wraxford Hall. Montague decides to commit the hall to canvas and on taking up his brushes, finds himself suffused with artistic powers that he had not, previously or since, possessed. Eleanor Unwin suffers from blinding headaches and an overbearing mother. Her headaches are the result of so-called visitations from the dead. The social niceties of the time are particularly well drawn in the women's narratives and journals. Unchaperoned ladies and unsuitable husband material are almost as much to be feared as the manor house that binds the various characters. Eleanor's toxic mother is especially outraged when marriage to an artist threatens to heap social stigma on her family. The scenes in and around Wraxford Hall are deliciously creepy. The weather-staples of Victorian mystery stories - the bone-chilling cold, swirling mists and lightning - are much in evidence as the protagonists attempt to uncover the secrets that they and the house share. If you've already enjoyed John Harwood's excellent first novel, The Ghost Writer, or, if Victorian-era mystery stories are your thing, you won't want to miss `The Seance'. This is a compelling and highly atmospheric novel from a superb writer.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Skeletons in the Closet, January 27, 2009
This review is from: The Seance (Hardcover)
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John Harwood's "The Seance" is heavily laden with Victorian atmosphere, and should delight most lovers of ghost stories and mysteries. The tale is told in six parts, made up of narratives by three of the story's main characters. It is a ghost story (or is it?) with a mystery at its heart. Family secrets abound, along with murder, blackmail, a sinister suit of armor, and a decaying old mansion that holds secrets of its own. The story was interesting enough to keep this reader turning pages (though not anxiously). A word here about the pace of the story: for me, the most enjoyable fiction adheres to the "show, don't tell" rule. "The Seance" is heavy on the telling, which slows the pace considerably, without necessarily building suspense. Thus, the three star rating. But this is simply a matter of taste. Many readers may find the detailed descriptive passages add to their enjoyment. Those readers should be especially pleased with this mostly satisfying tale.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The candle flame reflected beneath a blurred image of my face, the darkness is absolute.", January 4, 2009
This review is from: The Seance (Hardcover)
A man who believes in supernatural powers and seeks to harness them for his own ends lies at the core of The Séance, a beautifully plotted Victorian ghost story where the craving of power and revenge fuel much of the action. When the poverty-stricken Constance Langton inherits the vast ramshackle Wraxford Hall, the very large but quite uninhabitable manor house that lies on several hundred acres of woodland near the Suffolk coast, she cannot believe that all of the reported terror and cruelty could have taken place there. The house indeed has a dark history, where lightening bolts unexpectedly strike, where a ghostly suit of armour towers among the shadows, where the dark and sinister powers of mesmerism reign, and where the Hall's reclusive owners, Cornelius Wraxford and his only heir, his nephew Magnus, seem to have died in mysterious circumstances. John Montague, the family solicitor for the Wraxford estate, has sought Constance out to tell her that she is indeed the principal beneficiary and the sole heir to Wraxford Hall. The property is heavily encumbered with debt, the news forcing Constance to reflect on her own difficult circumstances, her estrangement from her uncaring father, her mother dead from heartbreak, and her sister Alma's sudden death. Only through Constance's encounter with the local spiritualist society and the comforts that the séances can bring can Constance lift the burden of guilt and self-reproach. Now living with her Uncle and plagued by an increasing restlessness of spirit, it is not surprising that she is attracted to Montague's strange and sinister tales of Wraxford Hall and that of Eleanor Unwin who was once married to Magnus, but had inexplicably disappeared with her baby daughter Clara on the night Magnus was planning to hold some kind of bizarre experiment. As the bitter cold and the wind howls around his house as though it would never cease, the narrative of John Montague begins with the tale of a haunted of Monks' Wood: " give the Hall a wide berth, especially after dark," and also of Magnus who has an initially charming personally and at first quite agreeable, but which only compounds the suspicion against him. And then there's Wraxford Hall itself, like a character that lives and breathes within the pages, with its faded tapestries, and its compounding air of desolation, " a cold bleak, echoing place, constantly smelling of damp and decay." The grey mist swirls and the focus changes to Eleanor Unwin whose frightening visions foretell death, particularly that of her fiancé Edward Ravenscroft, "the slender young man in his dark suit of mourning," and her visions of his death before she had even met him, and then her own disappearance and that of Clara. Restless and unhappy, and separated by time but not necessarily by circumstance Eleanor and Constance's lives steadily parallel as the mystery of Magnus and his strange attachment to Wraxford Hall is steadily revealed. Both women are down on their luck and stifled by the moral strictures of Victorian society. Certainly Eleanor starts out in thrall, coming under the spell of Magnus who seeks to mesmerize her, but he eventually subdues her will and shrouds her perception so that it becomes almost impossible for her to escape from his Machiavellian delights. Meanwhile Constance battles her desire that she may well be Eleanor's lost daughter Clara, drawing on the affinity she feels from the first pages of Eleanor's narrative: "It's as if the voice she heard from those pages was already familiar to me." With his tale awash with the paranormal and also sinister apparitions, much of John Harwood's novel is seized with a creeping, mortal dread that coils around the black clouds that constantly boil up above Wraxford Hall. Neither Eleanor or Constance are able to control their own destinies as their stories gradually interlock and Constance ends up finding herself at Wraxford Manor, caught up in a terrifying frenzy of ghostly goings-on. As this fine psychological novel moves from the claustrophobic and smoky drawing rooms of London where séances trap the innocent to the wild surrounds of Sussex and the ever-present darkness of Wraxford Hall, the pages are filled with murder and betrayal, the evil machinations of Magnus Wraxford and the spirits of the dead always around, eventually separating Constance from Eleanor "by only the thinnest of veils." Mike Leonard January 09.
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