‘Soothing rocking safety of a lie’
Lynette Olson
Saturday, October 21, 2006
“The Thirteenth Tale,” By Diane Setterfield, Atria, $26
“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightening strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing rocking safety of a lie.”
So Vida Winter, “England’s best-loved writer,” summons Margaret Lea, biographer and daughter of a London bookseller to write Winter’s life story in “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield. But the flamboyant Winter has been enhancing and exaggerating her past for so long that it’s not entirely clear what’s true and what’s not.
Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman’s story. And what a story it is, replete with madness; incest; a pair of twins who speak a private language; a devastating fire; a ghost that opens doors and closes books; a baby abandoned on a doorstep in the rain; a page torn from a turn-of-the-century edition of “Jane Eyre”; a cake-baking gentle giant; skeletons; topiaries; blind housekeepers; and suicide.
As Vida nears death, Margaret has yet to understand why she is the one Vida chose to write her history. And is it a tall tale? One last great fiction to leave for her reading public?
Setterfield’s work invokes both “Jane Eyre” and “Rebecca,” but the mystery is very much her own. Contending with ghosts and with a scary bunch of living people, Setterfield’s sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling — and is not ready for heartache and romance. And like Jane, she’s a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That’s where the comparisons end. Setterfield offers a polished and charming story that has its own pleasures. It is a contemporary gothic tale whose excesses and occasional improbabilities (Vida’s “brother” is the least convincing character) can be forgiven for the thrill of the storytelling.