The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Woman in Black and Smut

Having enjoyed Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone and her Costa winning novel The Hand That First Held Mine, I selected one of her earlier books to read next. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a shocking, unsettling but gripping story about a young woman who, in 1930's Edinburgh, is left in a mental health facility for most of her life. Is she mad or disturbed or even  just a bit unusual? Esme's family do not want to know. Fast forward sixty years and Iris receives a letter that her great aunt is about to be released. How Esme's history unfolds dramatically in tandem with the present day is a testament to the writing skill of Maggie O'Farrell. Her prose is from the top drawer. But nothing could have prepared us for the devastating conclusion.

Many of the reviews of the movie version of The Woman in Black had noted how it was different to the book in many ways. So I had to find out how Susan Hill had first imagined this story in her short novel of 1983. The screenplay now seems to have taken all the events from the book and mixed them up. The result is that the novel is far superior in all respects except one. The plot would not have made it an interesting film. It relies to a large degree on the feelings of Arthur Kipps as he experiences the haunting in subtle but disturbing ways. The appearance of ghost is much, much more dramatic than the shock produced just for the filmgoer's benefit. So the book does stand on it's own very well, and demonstrates just how difficult it is sometimes to bring such a story to the screen. I have to say that the writing is not to the standard that I normally go for, and it feels quite old fashioned in some way. But it does have a good atmosphere and is a ghost story and not a horror tale, and that for me makes it a satisfying read.

Even shorter is Alan Bennett's Smut. In fact it contains just two short stories. But what they lose in length they gain in entertainment. In fact I cannot understand why he does not write more fiction. His very short story The Uncommon Reader is exquisite and his only other fiction is Four Stories (I'm guessing short again) which is on order. Back to Smut. Well, the two stories are a little naughty, but in Bennett's hands they are always subtle, witty and so much fun. They are about mature, sensible, middle class women. No surprise there. I don't read a lot of non fiction, but I can never decide which is my favourite book of all time, his Writing Home or Untold Stories.