The Turn of the Screw: AND The Aspern Papers (Penguin Classics)
£0.80
Terrifying tale - Unlike some of the other reviewers here I still think this is the creepiest book I ve ever read, and all the more terrifying for the fact that James never articulates what s going on - he simply leaves your imagination to float free and conjure up all your worse nightmares. Yes, he s never an easy read (though this is far more accessible than Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl etc) but I think his very stately, mannered sentences and diction actually add to the horror of the story. Don t read this if you re expecting Stephen King or The Exorcist - James expects his readers to make the effort to read properly. Someone called this (possibly James himself?) the most poisonous little tale I could imagine and I think that s a perfect description - when I re-read it, it was on the tube with bright lights and lots of people around as I couldn t face reading it at home alone!
A good starting point for Henry James - I first became aware of Henry James when Colm Toibin released The Master. After The Master, I would have been happy never to hear of James again - it was a dull, dull book about an apparently dull, dull man. Imagine my ambivalence, then, when I was given a copy of The Aspern Papers and The Turning of the Screw...But from a sense of duty, I did open the book. And I m glad I did. Yes, Henry James does write some long and pompous sentences. In The Aspern Papers, these are forgivable since the narrator has to be a bit of a pompous man himself. I thought it worked less well in Screw, simply because it made the female private tutor seem, somehow, mannish. But where both tales excelled was in creating suspense and mystery. In Aspern, the suspense centres around a game of cat and mouse to persuade an aged former lover of the poet Jeffrey Aspern to part with her private writings and papers from Aspern, and in Screw it seems to concern the possession of two children by ghosts. In both, though, the eventual outcome is genuinely up for grabs right to the end with twists and turns aplenty. The leitmotif is of repressed emotion. But unlike the portrayal in The Master, I got the feeling that James understood the whole gamut of human emotion very well. It must have taken a great sense of empathy, both with the characters to understand the emotions being surpressed, and also with the reader to understand how to create a welling feeling of hope, expectation and fear. Henry James seemed very much a man of the world - as he probably had to be, selling his work by installments in magazines. I couldn t help noticing a similarity in style with Sheridan LeFanu, particularly in the ghostly theme of Screw. LeFanu also wrote a mixture of short stories, tales and novels, many of which had a deepening sense of mystery and forboding. I suspect LeFanu s writing style is often more acessible (i.e. shorter sentences) but there is also a tendency towards Victorian pomposity. The two writers also seemed to share a real need to set the narrator into a context - it was not enough to pitch in with the story, the narrator had to have a reason for telling it. This may seem rather outdated (although Neil Bartlett took it to new heights with Skin Lane this year), but it does have quite a charm to it.Of the two tales, I much preferred The Aspern Papers, perhaps because it didn t rely on ghosts (although the old lady did claim to be 150) and thus created a surreal but conceivable world. It also seemed to twist more as the narrator found himself variously on the front foot and back foot, but always erring on the side of caution for fear of losing the prize. Screw is, perhaps, a bit more linear. But as an introduction to Henry James - and even one jaded by Toibin s unfortunate tribute - the two tales make an excellent starting point.
Mastery - Henry James shows himself as the great master of American short fiction (alongside with Hawthorne and Poe). The Turn of the Screw is a moving and frightening tale about childhood and its dark side. James makes us aware that childhood is not always that Paradise we have been told. Read in a lonely night will increase your feelings of terror and... The Aspern Paper or what would you do to get what you most desire? Editors certainly are people authors, those surrounding authors, should be prevented against. Join a ravishing editor, the lover of a late writer and her simple niece, and you will have another superb example of the narrative possibilities of any topic when written by a great author.