Book Review: The Turn Of The Screw
“The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness”
I don’t know what it is about children, but they don’t half give me the creeps sometimes. And there is nothing more unnerving than a ghost story that involves the innocence of children, one that plays on what is good and inverts it to the sinister. There should be a purity to children; that unadulterated youthfulness which we as adults exalt and crave to be in again. Unfortunately summer is over and the idilic Laurie Lee childhood no longer exists. Winter is well on its way, the darkness is creeping in. There is something sacred about childhood, there is something natural about innocence, but when the natural turns supernatural everything is no longer what it seems.
We begin our fiendish tale in a small English parlour on Christmas Eve.An unknown narrator begins a tale of the most peculiar. The tale of a young governess – now long since dead, who was in charge of two children a girl and a boy in a large country estate called Bly. The women are excused from the room as the tale is so dark and uncomfortable that it is not suitable for women’s delicate ears to hear.
At first there is nothing unassuming about the tale. A young governess is employed to look after two children: Flora and Miles. However there are conditions: she is never to write to her employer about the children unless it’s an absolute emergency, for he will not care to answer them.
Flora is at home being looked after by the housekeeper whilst Miles is away at boarding school. But just as Miles returns, a letter arrives stating that he has been expelled. Yet the governess is hesitant to ask why. The children are both so charming. How could he have been expelled? For what reason?!
Our hesitant governess is charmed but worried. Miles never speaks of what has caused his expulsion and the housekeeper is no help. It is not until Miles enters the scene that sinister happenings start to happen around the house… ghosts appear and disappear and seem to have a very close relationship with Miles and Flora, much to the Governesses dismay. Although they both deny it, both children are constantly drawn to places well out of the way and highly dangerous, the deep lake for example. So here’s my question, are these children drawn away by these ghosts or are they possessed? The nature of their actions would not at all seem childish or child like: like how Miles got expelled. Or how Flora learnt to expertly lie and fear the governess.
Why the ghosts are after Miles and Flora remains unclear – it is for something sinister, of course. But this is why it is such a great ghost story: It is the fluidity of the “why”? Why are these ghosts here, how did they die? And why the children? It’s unnerving to read a novella and not know the “why”. In ghost stories you are settled into an understanding of why these ghosts are here, how the met their end and why they are so vengeful or remorseful. Yet with ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ we will never know. We can only guess.
It is a quiet story, unassuming in its narrative, there are no jump scares here. But what seems innocent is sinister and what’s more terrifying than an innocent which enjoys the dark?