Book Review: The Séance - ghostly visitations, dark and stormy nights, a creepy mansion...and murder.

The quasi-religion and social movement Spiritualism enjoyed a period of particular popularity from roughly 1840 through to the 1920s. One of its central beliefs was that specially gifted or trained “mediums” could glean knowledge of the afterlife by communicating with the dead.

The popularity of Spiritualism wasn’t so much a rejection of traditional Christianity as an expression of a yearning for certain evidence of life after death. Naturally, this led the bereaved to seek out mediums and mesmerists to intercede with deceased loved ones.

It’s against this backdrop in Victorian England that novelist John Harwood sets his creepy, atmospheric story The Séance. It’s recommended for anyone who might enjoy somber period fiction with decidedly dark and moody tone replete with a spooky old house.

Death is ever-present in the novel. At the beginning, young Constance Langford tries to ease the suffering of her mother – grieving for years over the loss of Constance’s younger sister Alma to scarlet fever. Constance’s attempt at bringing comfort to her mother through a séance has an unexpected result.

Shortly after that, Constance learns that she has inherited Wraxford Hall, a remote mansion in the English countryside. It is a dark and desolate place, the scene of numerous mysterious deaths and disappearances. “Never live there” is the urgent advice of John Montague, the solicitor in charge of the estate.

Harwood captures the flavour of life in Victorian England very well in the novel, conveying its social mores and mannerisms, how people spoke to each other, and, in particular, the way society treated women in contrast with men.

For instance, the character Eleanor Unwin, a young woman of marriageable age, becomes estranged from her mother when she declares that she will marry artist Edward Ravenscroft. In period and culture where it was of the utmost importance that a young woman secure her future and that of her family by “marrying well,” such a decision would have been regarded as irrational and self-destructive.

Told from shifting points of view through the individual first-person narratives of Constance, John Montague, and Eleanor Unwin, Harwood has total freedom to tell the story – to show how Wraxford Hall is the entity that unites them all.

Eleanor sees spirits in the form of “visitations,” and she is the one character in the novel who can be said to be possess “the gift” of sight into the realm beyond death. She, too, must deal with the threat of ending up bereft through non-marriage, and she exemplifies the cold reality that befell many women – marrying for the sake of security rather than out of love.

The Séance is a supremely dark and tantalizing murder mystery that bears all the elements of a really creepy ghost story; it’s a murder mystery, ghost story, and gothic tale all in one.