"Uncle Silas" by J. Sh. le Fanu
In fact I picked this book because of the main character's name. It seems not so popular in literature, as I can mention only two other examples: the albino monk from Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” and the mysterious caretaker from Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book”. Whereas the former I have only a vague recollection of, the latter is one of my favourite characters, one of those who stay behind your right shoulder to keep an eye on you. Gaiman is good at giving names: Silas sounds silky-smooth, and elusive, and hypnotizing like a cobra’s movements. Well, actually he takes after a panther, being a reincarnation of Bagheera, who was male in Kipling’s “Jungle Books”, although the Russian translation and cartoon presented a beautiful feminized version. And he is a vampire, although it is never stated in the text. Le Fanu is famous for his vampire tale “Carmilla”, but annotations and reviews of “Uncle Silas” carefully avoided spoilers concerning the hero’s nature - they only claimed all as one that the book is truly scary. I haven’t met, either, any expressed allusions between Le Fanu’s and Gaiman’s heroes, which looked strange to me, granting that Neil most likely had read “Uncle Silas” (maybe I should precise that from himself).
So I was curious. If anything kept me reading after the first 100 pages, it was mere curiosity. I absolutely intended to know when exactly the book was going to begin being scary.
The plot sets off like a classical gothic tale: on a windy November evening, in a sombre drawing-room of the secluded old house of Knowl. For a start, Mr Austin Ruthyn entrusts an all-important secret - the oddly shaped key and the cabinet which it opens - to his daughter Maud, seventeen, ingenuous and nervous, who is the ‘I’ of the following story. The secret proves to be the last will of her father, which puts the girl in Uncle Silas’s ward until she is twenty-one. Maud Ruthyn may be taken for an exemplary child, never doubting her father’s best motives for engaging an incredible governess or leaving a helpless girl with a huge legacy in charge of a virtually unfamiliar and most likely dangerous man, but she does not make a good teller. I am well aware of the law of the genre, but when the heroine is “unspeakably scared” on a permanent basis, it stops affecting the reader relatively soon. Actually, Maud Ruthyn has a rather narrow emotional range: she is generally frightened in the first volume and blushed in the second one, and scared again to the end. She meets many different people, but describes them throughout in the same words: Mary Quince is ‘honest’, Dudley is ‘odious’, Dr Bryerly ‘ugly and vulgar’, Milly ‘poor’ over and over. Uncle Silas is not so easy to define, but seemingly, the author himself could not cope with him. Was I expecting too much from a name-titled novel to produce a personality, some kind of coming-to-be? In one of the opening chapters Maud examines a portrait of Uncle Silas as a young man, and another, depicting him in the age of eight. He looks singularly handsome, clever and able and delicate, and Maud just refuses to believe that such a fine person could have committed an awful treacherous murder that he is suspected of. The situation reminds certainly of Dorian Gray, but all that our little Maud can do is to register the awesome contrast, not to analyse its origins anyway.
Once more, I understand that a young and feeble heroine is an image of uncertainty and anxiety that lives hidden deep in every human soul. I’m just wondering how the author himself didn’t get tired of her. Actually, the story is told in retrospective by Lady Ilbury, an adult woman, a wife and a mother. Yet, no sign of reflection or estimation, or causal-investigatory reconstruction. First-person narratives are not my preference; they are usually believed to sound more authentic, but here, I’m afraid, the male author more or less failed to pretend a teenage girl. Just one, but characteristic issue: at the crucial moment, the mortal danger approaching, not a thought comes to her about the man who’s obviously her sympathy (and who she marries afterwards). Looks like she cannot keep in mind more than one idea at a time. People around her come and go with a single purpose of terrifying her to death. The most horrible is the French gouvernante, and the fact that she’s a foreigner is too unsurprising for the English attitude.
Implying a gothic horror in the beginning, the book turns to be a social thriller, a story of everyday evil, confronted with figments of distempered imagination. It should be noteworthy as one of the first examples of this significant genre transformation, but, to my humble opinion, it lacks coherency and suspense. And definitely, Uncle Silas of Bartram-Haugh is not concerned with Silas of the graveyard - although their portrayal might have something in common.
So I was curious. If anything kept me reading after the first 100 pages, it was mere curiosity. I absolutely intended to know when exactly the book was going to begin being scary.
The plot sets off like a classical gothic tale: on a windy November evening, in a sombre drawing-room of the secluded old house of Knowl. For a start, Mr Austin Ruthyn entrusts an all-important secret - the oddly shaped key and the cabinet which it opens - to his daughter Maud, seventeen, ingenuous and nervous, who is the ‘I’ of the following story. The secret proves to be the last will of her father, which puts the girl in Uncle Silas’s ward until she is twenty-one. Maud Ruthyn may be taken for an exemplary child, never doubting her father’s best motives for engaging an incredible governess or leaving a helpless girl with a huge legacy in charge of a virtually unfamiliar and most likely dangerous man, but she does not make a good teller. I am well aware of the law of the genre, but when the heroine is “unspeakably scared” on a permanent basis, it stops affecting the reader relatively soon. Actually, Maud Ruthyn has a rather narrow emotional range: she is generally frightened in the first volume and blushed in the second one, and scared again to the end. She meets many different people, but describes them throughout in the same words: Mary Quince is ‘honest’, Dudley is ‘odious’, Dr Bryerly ‘ugly and vulgar’, Milly ‘poor’ over and over. Uncle Silas is not so easy to define, but seemingly, the author himself could not cope with him. Was I expecting too much from a name-titled novel to produce a personality, some kind of coming-to-be? In one of the opening chapters Maud examines a portrait of Uncle Silas as a young man, and another, depicting him in the age of eight. He looks singularly handsome, clever and able and delicate, and Maud just refuses to believe that such a fine person could have committed an awful treacherous murder that he is suspected of. The situation reminds certainly of Dorian Gray, but all that our little Maud can do is to register the awesome contrast, not to analyse its origins anyway.
Once more, I understand that a young and feeble heroine is an image of uncertainty and anxiety that lives hidden deep in every human soul. I’m just wondering how the author himself didn’t get tired of her. Actually, the story is told in retrospective by Lady Ilbury, an adult woman, a wife and a mother. Yet, no sign of reflection or estimation, or causal-investigatory reconstruction. First-person narratives are not my preference; they are usually believed to sound more authentic, but here, I’m afraid, the male author more or less failed to pretend a teenage girl. Just one, but characteristic issue: at the crucial moment, the mortal danger approaching, not a thought comes to her about the man who’s obviously her sympathy (and who she marries afterwards). Looks like she cannot keep in mind more than one idea at a time. People around her come and go with a single purpose of terrifying her to death. The most horrible is the French gouvernante, and the fact that she’s a foreigner is too unsurprising for the English attitude.
Implying a gothic horror in the beginning, the book turns to be a social thriller, a story of everyday evil, confronted with figments of distempered imagination. It should be noteworthy as one of the first examples of this significant genre transformation, but, to my humble opinion, it lacks coherency and suspense. And definitely, Uncle Silas of Bartram-Haugh is not concerned with Silas of the graveyard - although their portrayal might have something in common.