The Book Tower

Visiting some friends for New Year, we were greeted by overindulged adults complaining of illness. We were also surrounded by overexcited children, still not done with Christmas. While the grown-ups drifted in and out of consciousness and the kids busied themselves over a Playstation, I decided to seek out a quiet corner and read. And I picked a cracker of a book.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is about stories, both real and imagined. It touches on memory, duality, motherhood, loneliness and decay. It is also about mystery; ghosts, real and imagined, identity and the magic of the storyteller:

I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leant over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.

Margaret Lea is a lonely biographer, still living with her parents above their antiquarian bookshop. Early in the novel we learn that her mother is something of an unloving and distant figure in her life. Margaret has also discovered that she is one of twins, the other having died as an infant.

Enter the elderly Vida Winter, a famous, reclusive and prolific novelist. The two come together when Margaret is mysteriously invited by the sick Miss Winter to work on her biography. Her story is, as she tantalisingly describes, one of libraries, of ghosts and of twins. Margaret visits Vida Winter and listens to the story of two very unusual twins, Adeline and Emmeline, and begins to piece together a story that entwines the life of the novelist with the lives of others and with her own.

For a first novel, The Thirteenth Tale is an impressive read. It easily passed what I call The Pause Test, where I am in no hurry to finish a book, and will often actually stop and pause to think about it for a while before continuing. Diane Setterfield skillfully constructs the mystery of the novel; you want to keep reading Winter’s strange story just as much as Margaret wants to hear it. It is also very much a book about readers and reading, Margaret’s whole life revolves around books and she describes how she can lie in bed reading throughout the night. The relationship between truth and fiction and the role of the writer is called into question, but much more than in a novel like Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, another book about libraries and mysterious authors which I confess left me cold. The Thirteenth Tale easily drew me into the lives of Margaret Lea and Vida Winter.

Setterfield artfully stitches her themes into the book. Where it could so easily have been portrayed clumsily, the ghost of Margaret’s lost twin and the other hauntings in the story are subtly handled. Vague, misshapen reflections stare back at Margaret from every dark window she sees, mist and rain make their entrance at the most appropriate moments and half-heard sounds and half-remembered dreams all contribute to the captivating story.

The Thirteenth Tale is very much a mystery story, one which Margaret Lea manages to piece together after finding a different account of events to Vida Winter’s. This is the crux of the book, not only how no two versions of a story can be the same, but how a storyteller will only tell the version of a story that they want you to hear, even if they claim to be telling the truth. I confess that I only unravelled the mystery at the same time as Margaret, although looking back I realised that there were plenty of clues scattered through the chapters for the detectives out there.

When Margaret falls ill towards the end of the novel, a doctor jokingly prescribes a course of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to pacify the sleuth within her. For me, The Thirteenth Tale reminds more of Barbara Vine’s fiction in how the intricate links between past and future are explored and eventually explained. Dickens also gets a mention in this novel and, like Dickens’ fiction, some readers may find that all of the loose ends are tied up rather too neatly. For me, however, The Thirteenth Tale was an excellent read.