[Read as an audiobook from the public library]
Sigh. Okay. Y’all, I really, really like Crimson Peak. It’s a weird, sexy, stylish, haunted spun sugar mess of a thing that I will watch any time it’s on. And clearly the author of The Death of Jane Lawrence also likes it. And I do not fault her taste for that. But I feel like she might have some views on the Law of Attraction that we might argue about.
Jane Shoringfield is a sensible woman. She loves math and numbers and doing sums. She’s a self-taught accountant, and a good one. But she’s nearing spinsterhood in a time and place (a fictional analog of Victorian England) when that is undesirable. A woman cannot live independently, and so she decides on a marriage of convenience to the local doctor, Augustine Lawrence, sight unseen until the day she makes her case to him. He is also unmarried, her age, comfortable enough not to require a dowry but not so rich to demand social engagements. She is not interested in children, or even sex. She simply wants an arrangement so she can be independent but covered under society’s rules.
But Augustine turns out to be quite handsome, if also slightly mysterious, and eventually is amenable to her suit. She wins him with her logic and her steady nerve, and her ability to do his books and serve as a nurse. Of course, they begin to fall in love. And suddenly Jane no longer cares for the terms of their arrangement, where he will sleep alone every night in his gloomy ancestral home and she will remain alone in town. The more Jane discovers, the more she wants to know, until she reaches a point of no return, where she cannot forget, and must flee or face her fears to save the man she has come to want above everything else.
The first two-thirds or so of the story is your pretty standard Gothic romance. Handsome but doomed man has a secret, a dilapidated manor looms in the country, spirits – or something like spirits – roam the halls at night. If you’ve seen Crimson Peak or read Rebecca or Jane Eyre – or if, like me, you saw The Screaming Skull on Mystery Science Theater 3000 – you’re going to assume fairly quickly that Augustine is Up To Something. And you’re not going to be entirely wrong, but…well.
The world this book takes place in is not England or America or any place here. It’s very clearly based on Victorian England, but there’s been a war not unlike World War II, and also magic (kind of like what’s in Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell) is real. And this is where Starling starts to lose me. It’s not that I’m not all in on the idea of magic. I half attempted some rituals myself in my youth, and the things she writes about are not far removed from a sort of English folk magic people practiced for centuries. I don’t even mind how she weaves mathematics in – Lovecraft does much the same in The Dreams in the Witch House.
But where we diverge is this idea that starts about halfway in with the idea that magicians pay a price for their workings, and that price is a physical manifestation – something inside them goes wrong. A man appears with a twisted bowel. A woman has an ectopic pregnancy. Stories are told of people with excessive bone overgrowth, teratomas, unexplained masses. These, it is implied, are due to magic – the attempt of the magician to work their will upon the world. In other words, they bring it on themselves. And that is an idea that, even in fiction, I just cannot stomach. Many of the conditions Starling ascribes to magic are genetic. Others are just the haphazard division of cells. The idea that a person might draw good or bad to them through ritual or power of thought is one thing, but when that crosses a line into “you caused your fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva by being overgreedy with magic,” my brain nopes out. Apparently I have no patience for poetic license with disease. Who knew?
I thought the twist in the ending was not bad if not overly original. I liked Jane and Augustine, even though half my notes while listening were prefaced with “GIRL.” They definitely behave with all the imagined propriety of a Victorian couple and sometimes that can wear on a modern reader who just wants two people to kiss already, yeesh.
This is not a bad book, if you have the patience to make it through the draggy math bits and the draggy ritual bits and the parts where I wanted to scream that humans don’t work that way. If you can suspend your disbelief further than I was able to, you might enjoy it. If they make this into a film, I’ll probably stream it, depending on who they cast for Augustine.