Customer Reviews

The Turn of the Screw - Literary Touchstone Classic

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Turn of The Screw by Henry James. Published by MobileReference (mobi)

I was astonished by the great quality of "The Turn of the Screw." It is fascinating and remarkably entertaining. I highly recommend the Kindle edition by MobileReference. An excellent choice!

The Turn of The Screw by Henry James. Published by MobileReference (mobi)

Henry James's tale is the last of the gothic Victorian novellas, with its richly developed sense of propriety - a semblance of manners and understatement concealing primitive subliminal impulse. Its dense, symbolic language penetrates deeply into the psyche. There is evil here. But its emanation is ambiguous and amorphous. The characters exist in a pervasive atmosphere of dread. The exact source of that dread has intrigued readers since it was written.

Comments from the Publisher:

We apologize for the inconvenience. The book was corrected on April 25th, 2009. The new version has the prologue.

MobileReference

THE TURN OF THE SCREW is the ambiguous story of a governess teaching two young orphaned children whose uncle guardian has assumed the financial responsibility for their upbringing but wishes to have absolutely no physical or emotional contact with them. Very shortly after she assumes her duties, ghostly apparitions begin to frequent the children's home and the surrounding grounds. Initially, the governess is worried that her sanity may be in question but, when she describes the appearances of the phantoms to the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, they are identified as Miss Jessel, the former governess and corrupt valet, Peter Quint, who left the home under very questionable circumstances. The governess, now convinced that the phantoms are all too real, is terrified that they are attempting to abduct and corrupt the souls of her two precious charges, little Flora and Miles.

Written in 1898, THE TURN OF THE SCREW has a reputation as the quintessential Victorian horror story and is revered in English literature as one of the finest examples of the genre. With advance billing like that, I wanted to like it, I really did. In a desire to be fair and balanced to a novella that has such a lofty reputation, I've taken the liberty of quoting Mary Whipple's eloquent five-star Amazon review (because I've come to trust Mary's opinions and, in fact, this is one of the reviews that prompted me to read it in the first place). Mary characterized the story as " ... still haunting after all these years."

"One of the most seductive of all ghost stories, TURN OF THE SCREW is a sophisticated and subtle literary exercise in which the author creates a dense, suggestive, and highly ambiguous story, its suspense and horror generated primarily by what the author does NOT say and does not describe. Compelled to fill in the blanks from his/her own store of personal fears, the reader ultimately conjures up a more horrifying set of images and circumstances than anything an author could impose from without.

... Though the governess is certainly neurotic and repressed, this novel was published ten years before Freud, suggesting that the story should be taken at face value, as a suspenseful but enigmatic Victorian version of a Faustian struggle for the souls of these children, yet numerous other interpretations find their ardent supporters as well."

While many ideas have been put forward, no unequivocal solutions to the mystery of the story exist because, frankly, James himself provided no explanations which might shed any light on this meta-mystery.

For many readers, this type of ambiguity is quite acceptable. Indeed, it is often the hallmark of a horror story that provides the spine-tingling frisson reaction that lovers of the genre look for. But, frankly, I just didn't care for it. Too me it smacked of an author who had a few rather creepy ideas abrogating his responsibility for the resolution of the plot and leaving it entirely up to the readers.

Even allowing for the literary habits of Victorian writers, the writing style itself, for my tastes, was lofty, muddled, pretentious and extraordinarily difficult to interpret. I found myself reading many sentences over and over again merely to haul a basic meaning out of the words. The reactions and the resulting decisions and actions of the governess and the housekeeper seemed odd, at best, and contrived and silly at the other extreme.

Sure, with the benefit of hindsight, I've read the analysis and the comments and I can see how they apply but, in the reading itself, I just didn't get it at all. And I don't think of myself as an inattentive reader or someone with constrained ideas by any means. So, despite the best of intentions, this is a review that definitely goes against the grain and pans what is generally considered a classic!

Not recommended.

Paul Weiss

This edition provides provacative notes to assist the reader who is not accustomed to the gothic romance genre. Various critical theories are proposed which stimulate attentive reading. My own reading would lean towards the notion that James is satirizing popular horror stories, while at the same time taking jabs at readers who absorb them. In any case, the novella provokes interesting discussion.

Although it is a glimpse into the personal mind more than a horror story and causes the reader to question the sanity of the source of the information, I found it to be uninteresting. Maybe that was unique back then, but not anymore. It also deals with suggestions of taboo subjects such as homosexuality and pedophiles, but only suggestions. I imagine that was unique in its time too. I just found that where some books that leave things unresolved or ambiguous (Calling of Lot 49, for instance) are all the better for it, this one just leaves me feeling that it just didn't work here. I'm not sure why this particular book remains after all these years. That said, it isn't horrible. Just average.

"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts." ~Italo Calvino

I have over 300 books that are considered "classics" on my to-read list. I am familiar with the plots of some of the most famous classics that I haven't read; however, in most of them I couldn't even tell you the plot or theme of the book. I was surprised to find out that The Turn of the Screw is actually a ghost story. Who knew?

I wanted a short quick classic book to read before my next book club book and so I grabbed one of the shortest on my list coming in at just over 100 pages. It was anything but a quick read for me. The biggest problem I have is that I typically read books late at night and usually I can read for an hour or two. For a week straight I found myself reading five pages and falling asleep. It was a struggle. The writing is very good but he is very descriptive almost to a fault in my opinion.

The book is about a young governess who is hired by a man who really has no desire to raise his niece and nephew after their parents have died. She is really enamored with the little boy and girl and thinks that they are near perfect. However, you can tell right away that something is off with these kids in a Children of the Corn sort of way. The governess starts seeing the ghosts of two people that worked there in the past that had been tragically killed. She believes that the children sees them as well and communicates with them ... but do they?

James leaves the ending very ambiguous and it can be interepreted many ways. Usually I don't like an openended ending; however, in this case I think it worked well. The book picks up in the final 30 pages; however, I can't recommend it because the first 60-70 pages were a bear.

The story was interesting and worhtwhile reading.
The ending leaves all interpretation to the reader so you don't really know what to think.

This is the last time that I let Gil Grissom recommend a book for me. Yes, I let a fictional character from a TV show pick a book for me to read. The story is a fairly simple and uninspired Gothic "horror" story. There are some ghosts who never really do anything and a governess who overreacts to everything. The idea that perhaps the governess is insane and this isn't a simple horror story, in my opinion comes from the fact that it is impossible to justify reading this story without that conundrum.

Besides the plot being rather pedestrian is the writing of Henry James. He uses sentences that are confused, confusing, and in many places indecipherable. At 120 pages, the book is probably 100 pages too long. Some examples:

"Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill that we vociferously denied we felt; and we had all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, to mark the close of the incident, almost automatically through the very same movements."

"But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house that I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recourse of a sound or two, less natural and not without but within, that I had fancied I heard."

These were sentences randomly pulled from the book and are a fair representation of the writing style of Henry James. The main part of the story is supposed to be written by the governess so one might try to argue that James is trying to capture something of the governess in this style but the introduction is virtually identical and is not written by the governess. Even the end of the story lacks completion as it leaves the entire tale unresolved. There is nothing to recommend this story for personal reading (other than being able to say you read it) and if it is required reading, at least getting through promises a grade at the end.

As far as this edition of the book, it is fairly well done with a glossary in the back to explain some difficult words and phrases and a points for discussion section at the front. But with such a difficult book, I think most students would appreciate more discussion of the book in a general way and perhaps even a brief description of the action of each chapter. The book itself I would rate rather poor and this edition I would rate as fair. Overall, three stars is a generous review.