"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within, it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."
It is one of the most celebrated openings in a modern novel, regardless of genre, and serves as the perfect opener to the remarkable piece of work that follows. it is a tight piece of writing, it suggests so much more than it signposts, with every t crossed, every sentence neatly dotted by its end and whatever moves through the text, moves alone. But then that is the very nature of reading is it not? We enter and leave alone.
In the book a loose team of researchers stay at Hill House, a house with a bad reputation in a district that has never quite mastered the notion of welcome. They are a fantastic four of very different mindsets and personalities. Led by Doctor John Montague, an imminent investigator of the paranormal, the other three are; Theodora, a clever and complicated bohemian figure and artists model and inspiration, Luke Sanderson, a cocky heir to the house and all its secrets and Eleanor Vance, a sadly mentally unbalanced youngish woman, really the last person who should stay at the insane house on the hill, the brutalist and yet painfully old world house built by Hugh Craine.
All four were strangers to each other until they met at Hill House, yet each in their time had individually brushed up against the paranormal. Yet their individual experiences do not prepare them for what follows in that house. Such is the gossamer weave spun by Shirley Jackson as she spins a web about her protagonists we are sometimes not sure if what they see is what is there. It is one of the most lingering aspects of the novel, the ghosts that linger in the imagination long after you put the book down. She implies that her cast of misfits are blessed, or more accurately cursed with extrasensory gifts, in a house where to see less would be a blessing. Eleanor may in fact possess latent telekinetic abilities, a "gift" that has not served her well. With that terrible house amplifying everything which lurks beneath the surface poor Eleanor would have been safer in a den of vipers. But this was a woman on the run, fleeing a life of grinding ennui, nowhere to go and no time to get there. All she wished to find was a safe place to rest her head, a small haven to call her own. For a short time her pretend family feels real, the rooms of Hill House a place to call her own. This is the cruelist trick played by that spiteful house, an ogres den pretending to be a fairy castle, with homeless Eleanor a priness in search of a kingdom. A child woman burdened with a lifetime of unfulfilled expectations.
And all the while that mad house abides.
I think this about the third time I have sat down with Shirley Jackson's best remembered work. Each time I have found so much more than the previous. Her touch is light but jarring, Like a hand resting on your own in a room you thought you were alone in.
