Customer Reviews

The Shrouded Walls

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I really enjoyed this Susan Howatch book. Despite the formulaic plot, the characterisation of the heroine and the hero are slightly out of the ordinary. In the midst of the murders and detection, the romance is nicely developed. The heroine is quite young and childish but the hero, Axel is approriately mysterious! A well written Gothic read and the only historical one out of the six short novels that Howatch wrote before her masterpiece Penmarric was published.

Gothics were my standard reading fare in my teens and early twenties (Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney and others) but I haven't read one in many years. So I decided to take a step back in time by reading a Victorian Gothic, The Shrouded Walls by Susan Howatch.

The Shrouded Walls is just standard Victorian Gothic fare, nothing really original: young heroine virtually alone in the world; rich, mysterious older man who sweeps her off her feet and into a hurried marriage; a huge, old family mansion; murder and tense undercurrents among her husband's numerous family members. There is nothing wrong with The Shrouded Walls, it is just a very stereotypical Gothic. In fact, I think the writing is a bit better than what I remember of Victoria Holt, as Howatch's characters seem infused with a bit more feeling that Holt's, and Howatch's heroine has more spark and spunk than any of Holt's (I don't remember Phyllis Whitney's style so much; perhaps I need to give one of her books a re-read one of these days). And Howatch's plot was a tiny bit less predictable than the norm, since usually the young innocent heroine finds herself falling in love with her husband, in spite of all the dark secrets and unknowns that start to surface about him. In fact, that is one of the standard plot devices of a Gothic that is supposed to create tension and uncertainty; however, it never does because after reading one Gothic you know that the object of the heroine's love never ends up being the culprit. Howatch, however, makes her plot slightly less predictable in that the heroine isn't in love with her husband; she alternates between being drawn to him out of extreme loneliness and being unattracted to him. This makes it not at all certain to the reader whether or not her husband really is guilty of the things she begins to suspect him of.

All in all, The Shrouded Walls delivered just what I expected from it; a nice, short break in-between other books. Yes, the plot strains credulity, but who expects realism from a Gothic? They are escapist entertainment; The Shrouded Walls is an excellent short intermission between more serious reading matter, and I can recommend it as such.