Book review: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The Little Stanger

Photo: Jesse Butler

In this review: Katherine Howe's The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger

In some sense, both Sarah Water's The Little Stranger and Katherine Howe's The Physic Book of Deliverance Dane are supernatural thrillers, but each book takes a fundamentally different approach to the role of the supernatural in the ultimate metaphysical grounding of their respective plots. To a great extent, the plot of each book is such that almost all of its respective turns of events can be explained in the context of the dominant scientific materialist weltanschauung that the vast majority of readers (whether consciously or not) subscribe to. Of course, as with all passable stories that fall into this genre, there is also the possibility that there has been a supernatural influence that has fundamentally changed the course of events in the plot. With good stories of the genre, it becomes impossible to tell precisely what exactly caused the plot twists that make the books that present these stories very difficult to stop reading. With great supernatural thrillers, the fact that significant events of plotting are so completely overdetermined by scientific causation as well as by "supernatural" causation causes a genuine epistemic puzzle the attempted resolution of which causes a pleasant bewilderment of the part of the attendant reader. Of course, it takes more than a cleverly crafted scientific/supernatural tension and overdetermination to make great supernatural thriller; there must also be superb writing in terms of character development and "place setting".

That said, while each is good, neither The Little Stranger nor The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is great. Each book is very readable, and a lot of fun for someone sunning on the beach (or for an unemployed philosopher enjoying the free air conditioning after riding his bike to Borders), but neither achieves the right tension between that which we think is obvious given our knowledge of the workings of world and that which might, even though invisible to most, cause important things to happen. Whereas Waters' The Little Stranger is certainly cautious in terms of its use of supernatural elements (perhaps even too sparing), in The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Howe oversteps the conventions of supernatural-thriller-in-which-the-supernatural-element-is-plausibly-deniable by representing Connie, her protagonist, as making actual magic (little blue lightning bolts emanating from her finger tips!).

That said, each book has significant merit in terms of the plausibility with which each represents its characters, their dialogue and interactions with each other. The Little Stranger paints a picture of the early post-war English West Midlands we feel that we could almost step into. The dialogue between protagonist / narrator Dr. Farraday and Mrs. Ayres is so spot-on that after reading a dozen or twenty pages, one feels that one could almost slip into the manner of speaking of the mid Twentieth Century speech of the Warwickshire gentry. And even though Katherine Howe splits the pages of her novel between the Salem, Massachusetts of 1991 and the Salem of the mid Seventeenth to mid Eighteenth centuries, her recreation of the characters around the time of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and later is believable (though not nearly as masterful as Waters') and ultimately emotionally moving.

The Little Stranger's Dr. Faraday, has been fascinated by Hundreds Hall, the local, imposing and upon reflection even slightly sinister manner house, since Empire Day of 1919 when he was ten years of age. Because his mother was employed at the Hundreds as a servant for the Ayres, he was able to sneak inside and in a surprisingly non-mischievous manner to pry an ornamental acorn from the decorative plaster border of a built-in cabinet. He waits for the house or one of its residents to notice his trespass, but neither the Hundreds nor any of its occupants do. He's left with the acorn, which didn't slide out at all as gracefully as he thought it would, leaving chalky residue on the inside of his pocket. Mr. and Mrs. Ayres and the servants are too preoccupied with the fête and the Ayres young daughter, Susan, to notice anything that's happened.

As much of a letdown as this scene seems to be – a violation against an ancient and authoritative presence of the house for which we await a commensurate response, but for which one never comes – as far as I can see it stands for the whole of the book's plot. Almost thirty years after the Empire Day fête at which the future Dr. Faraday steals the ornamental acorn, after the end of yet another world war, he has another occasion to visit Hundreds Hall when Roderick, the son of Mrs. Ayres born after the death of the child Susan, calls on behalf of the servant girl Betty. Betty's frightened by both the house's overbearing silence and what she might describe as its sense of vindictive playfulness. Of course, Betty's intimation that something is amiss is a clue for us: something is not right with the house, we can tell it's important because it spooks the firmly grounded maid-servant -- the occupant with, by far, the most horse-sense of the bunch. Not to say that the Ayres are flighty and ungrounded. Mrs. Ayres has unfailing manners imbued with flourishes of Edwardian era grace and her surviving children Roderick and Caroline are polite and pleasant to read about even though they have flaws and idiosyncrasies of their own.

After Dr. Faraday's fateful call to check on Betty, he strikes up a friendship / professional relationship with the Ayres. He becomes their family doctor and a friend of the family who stops by at irregular intervals to chat and check on them. The arrangement is plausible because Roderick still struggles with wounds he received as a flier in the most recent world war. Dr. Faraday provides some electro-therapy for Rod's injured muscles and comes to have a sort of playful-youthful-middle-age-doctor-
joking-with-tomboy relationship with Caroline.

The story of the doctor from a working class background meeting the lady of the manner and her family against the backdrop of a house coming to ruin (along with the upper stratum of the English class system in general (?)) would lope along nicely with little plot. But for some reason, Waters feels the need to infuse, however weakly, the book with a strain of psychological / supernatural horror.

Simply put, after enough place setting and establishment of a relationship between Dr. Faraday and the Ayres family, weird things start to happen. Burn marks appear on the walls of Roderick's room. The wall comes to exhibit a child's pencil marks that they didn't before. Caroline's dog, Gyp, normally friendly and outgoing, mauls a young girl who's come with her parents to a party at the Hundreds. Small footsteps are heard from the upstairs room – a nursery that has been closed since the death of Mrs. Ayres first daughter Susan died. All signs point to a haunting of the house by the ghost of the young Susan. But the haunting falls flat. Of course, Waters shows expertly how the psychological states of the Ayres slowly weaken and collapse under the weight of what may be a haunting of the house, but the elements of the haunting itself are weak. The things that happen just aren’t very frightening or eerie for the reader.

There is a part of the story that deals with Caroline's initial attraction to Dr. Faraday and then her bizarre retreat from him. The characterization of our protagonist's feelings over the course of his tortured relationship with Caroline Ayres is pitch perfect, but it isn't very well motivated in the context of supposed ghost story. Dr. Faraday's motivations seem clear if not entirely unselfish. He eventually falls for Caroline and wants to rescue her from the madness that it seems to him that her family is descending into. He wants to save Hundreds Hall from what he thinks is their irrationality and obsession with an implausible ghost.

But for the tension between Faraday's conviction that everything can be explained with resort only to the family's psychological and physical exhaustion, and Roderick's, Mrs. Ayres' and eventually Caroline's belief that there is a weird disruptive unnatural force to work, the supernatural element would have to be played up (something a bit more convincing would have be offered) or completely played down (Roderick would have to be show to be completely imagining things – burns on the wall and everything else – to make more believable his deteriorating mental state). As it stands, the book leaves us in an unexciting space of credulity and plausible deniability. As I read, I was holding out hope until the very end that something would happen to tie everything together and make it the case that the slow and theretofore underperforming plot was somehow key to the understanding the fate of the doomed Ayres family. But there was no such tying together. The book ends by aiming toward a dramatic and tragic resolution which attempts to bring its arc full circle, but by last few pages I'd lost all sympathy for any of the characters. The end is simply the escape of the last little bit of steam left.

Like The Little Stranger, the action of Katherine Howe's The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane does not take place in the present. Unlike the former, whose plot takes almost entirely in 1948-9, the outer frame of The Physick Book is the summer and fall of 1991. The frame story begins with Connie's (short for Constance) PhD proposal defense at Harvard University. Her studies in American Colonial history are greatly aided by her incredible facility with visual memory. During the defense she has imagined all of the facts she's learned as being written down on 3"x5" index cards all filed neatly in boxes on a kind of mental shelf. When she's asked a question, she simply has to mentally "find" the right card in the right box on the shelf and use the information on it to inform her response.

Having gone through the excruciation of the PhD proposal process myself, I felt an immediate kinship for Connie, and in the first few pages I was pretty well hooked. Aside from this particular feature of the novel, I feel that while Waters' verbal dexterity in representing characters' dialog and the immensity and completeness of the possible world she's imagined in her book are really staggering (her vision is so complete that it does really feel like you, the reader, are a servant in the Hundreds just listening to it all take place), Howe's story, although not as expert as Waters', is more accessible to an American audience. In the outer frame, she's capturing, albeit in less detail, the life of hipster grad student at Harvard in 1991. That's something much closer to my experience than Dr. Faraday's narrative.
Since Howe is herself a graduate student of American Colonial Studies at a university in Boston, it's only natural that Connie's story frames a long ranging period of colonial history of Massachusetts – from roughly the mid Seventeenth to the mid Eighteenth Centuries. How Connie's story frames this sweep of history is what makes the novel so interesting.

In June '91, shortly after her proposal defense, 25 year old Connie is tasked by her mother, Grace, to ready the house of Grace's mother Sophia for sale. The house, in nearby Marblehead, Mass, has been abandoned since Sophia's death years before. Sophia's old house isn't named in the book, but perhaps it should have been as it almost takes on the status of being a character. It's a creepy old place deep in a dark and thick patch of forest with no telephone or electricity. There's also an untended, yet mysteriously thriving garden in what little yard the place has in which grow, in addition to tomatoes, plants like wolfsbane, lambsear, monkshood, spearmint and even a mandrake root.

Spooky enough, but as she begins cleaning Sophia's ancient house, Connie finds an ancient bible. As she picks it up, an equally ancient key falls out – a key so old as to be of the style that has a hollow shaft. Inside the key is piece of paper on which is written 'Deliverance Dane'. Who or what was Deliverance Dane? Turns out that Deliverance Dane was the name of a woman hanged in 1692 as a result of being found guilty of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trial. By looking at old probate records, Connie finds out that one of Deliverance Dane's few possessions at the time she was hanged was a "Physick Book" or book of remedies.

Connie becomes interested in the story of Deliverance Dane and wants to track down the Physick Book. In a keenly accurate rendering of how things seems always to work in graduate school, Connie's new dissertation advisor, Dr. Chilton, becomes very interested in the book as well. He believes that Connie's recovery of the Physick Book may well help her to write the stellar dissertation which could launch her academic career and put her on a winning trajectory. The usually blasé Boston "brahmin" Chilton always becomes unusually excited by any talk of the Physick Book. He urges Connie to track it down. In fact, he demands that she do so and in the end becomes more than subtly threatening in his fervor for her to locate it.

We know more about the book and its history than do either Connie or Dr. Chilton because we are privy to the history that Connie's search frames. Chapters of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane alternate between the summer of 1991 and the periods of Deliverance Dane's life and the lives of her daughter and grand-daughter. Howe places us in a position to see quite a bit more context by letting us see the events of Deliverance Dane's life before and during the Witch Trials. After her hanging in 1692, we learn more about her daughter Mercy and grand-daughter Temperance.

The framed middle to late colonial periods of Massachusetts are fascinating. Howe gives life to the characters around the time of the Salem Witch Trials and provides us with a portal through which we can hear their speech and get a feel for their day-to-day existences. The framed episodes of history are also important stylistically for Howe's book. The scenes she depicts from far back in the past take on a special gravity and somber tone because the speech of the characters is so similar to modern English (it is after all comprehensible) but also very different. The speech and manner of those historical figures of the late Seventeenth Century imbues their stories with a seriousness and historical weight that it's impossible to feel in regard to characters of the modern day. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the lives of people of that period were viciously difficult and brutal by our current standards. Their words and deeds seem much more important, so much more infused with a gravitas given the hardships they faced. One gets the feeling that they faced so much adversity that they didn't have time or energy to spend on idle chatter. So, when one had something to say, he made damn sure it was important, well phrased and to the point. Their manner and circumstance demand that we listen carefully and respectfully to what they report.

Contrast this to what Connie's life is like and what she talks about. Dissertation meetings, jokes with her fellow grad students about going to see fireworks on the Forth of July and rather petty struggles with her mother over Grace's dealings in New Age therapies and psychic "intuitings". Of course, it's unlikely that someone in Marblehead, Mass is 1700 had thoughts on average any deeper than someone in Marblehead, Mass three hundred years later, but Howe makes a convincing case that they did (or at least seemed to).

One aspect of The Physick Book that is absolutely brilliant (which stands out in fairly sharp contrast to The Little Stranger) is the former's seamless construction in terms of plot. Every seeming twist has some precedent or cause earlier in the text that an observant reader would have noticed (or at least would notice after a moment's reflection). Dr. Chilton's creepily overbearing nature evident from the opening proposal defense, Connie's amazingly accurate description of the multitude of plants in Sophia's overgrown untended garden and even the first names of the major female characters in the book are important to the plot of the narrative. Every detail provided serves as an explanation of some later development.

Of course, The Little Stranger, even though it was nowhere near as gripping, handled much more deftly the issue of whether or not the supernatural was actual. We are certain that there is actual magic worked by the Connie in The Physick Book: she goes so far as to summon healing "blue" energy for an bewitched boyfriend and to summon Dr. Chilton at one point by casting a spell. I agree with a reviewer who is put off by the obvious actuality of magic in supernatural mysteries and thrillers.

Could The Physick Book have worked if all the supernatural elements were such that a reader could have reasonably explained them away? I argue that it could, and it could have done so in a way that wouldn't have taken away from its interest and engrossing of the reader. The Little Stranger goes to far in making the elements of the supernatural easily assimilable to an equally plausible "rational" explanation of things. In fact, its elements of the supernatural aren't really that eerie. The Physick Book oversteps this line of convention, but it needn't have. Even so, it's a page-turner with which one feels a definite satisfaction upon having finished.