I did say I’d be
reviewing Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old
Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared this week, but as I’ve been
slightly busier than I predicted and the novel
is taking me longer to get through that I thought it might, I’ve decided to go
for a book I read a few months back: Diane Setterfield’s Bellman & Black.
Bellman
& Black,
Setterfield’s second novel, was published last year. It follows the life and
death of William Bellman, a work-obsessed man haunted by death and time – and
the occasional rook. It is a ghost story, and a whole lot more.
First off I should
say that I love Setterfield’s first
novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Words
cannot describe my adoration of this book. You may have noticed that I quoted
from it in my blog introduction. It is my favourite non-Victorian novel,
and makes it into my top ten favourite books alongside a wealth of nineteenth
century literary greats. It is the only book I’ve read more than twice that’s
neither by Dickens nor on my GCSE/A-level/university courses. It contains all
the elements I best like to find in novels: unreliable narrators, stories
within stories, fantastic and enigmatic characters, mysteries that are resolved
unpredictably but not ridiculously – plus a healthy amount of references to
Dickens and the Brontës. If I ever forget why I want to be a writer I only need
to read The Thirteenth Tale to
remember. It’s a thoroughly perfect novel. If you haven’t read it, do. At once.
Much as William
Bellman lives in the shadow of a childhood act of cruelty, Bellman & Black has no choice but to live in the shadow of
Setterfield’s first wondrous novel. I often feel slightly bad for authors stuck
in this situation, having to follow a brilliant and successful work with
something they know fans will never think is as good (for a more high-profile
example you only need to think of the reception of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy – another brilliant book
that I may try and review one of these days). Everyone who read and enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale has no doubt been
waiting as eagerly as me for the last seven years for Setterfield’s second
novel, and everyone who read and enjoyed The
Thirteenth Tale undoubtedly sat there reading Bellman & Black and, like me, couldn’t quite resist making a
string of comparisons between the two.
Bellman
& Black is a
very good book. Setterfield is, as always, a master of atmosphere. Death hangs
over the novel in an eerie yet enthralling way. The suspense is astounding. I
especially love that Setterfield manages to place the novel historically
without needing a date. She does the same in her first novel, and here it is
perhaps even more effective. It would be all too easy for Setterfield to once
or twice mention, say, 1850, and our minds would at once be filled with vague
images of a smoky industrial Dickensian Britain, urbanisation, illness, mills, top
hats and pocket watches. But Setterfield works far harder. The novel is thoroughly
Victorian, without be explicitly Victorian in any way. It is Victorian in
atmosphere, though never stated in fact. This gives it a fantastic sense of the
apolitical, and the ahistorical. The fact that the novel is never dated also
enforces the relevance of its themes today. After all, as Bellman points out, ‘death
doesn’t go out of fashion’.
Thematically, the
novel is fascinating. The central themes are death, work and time – and all
those other, more important, things that might get pushed to the side by the
weight of those three. The novel explores and sustains these themes
brilliantly. Bellman & Black could
easily be studied, and I’ve no doubt that book clubs will have a field day with
it.
The ending is
effective, dramatic and purposeful, if not quite as jaw-dropping as the closing
of The Thirteenth Tale. Likewise, the
characterisation of William Bellman – his intelligence and occasional
carelessness, his endeavours to escape the past by burying himself in work –
all of these are well drawn and explored. There are some especially poignant
moments, including the deaths of various members of William’s family and, later
in the novel, his not-quite-relationship with needleworker Lizzie.
I also like the
occasional passages from books on birds, especially the references to all the
bizarre and somewhat creepy collective nouns for rooks, including not only
‘parish’ and a ‘parliament’ but, my personal favourite, a ‘storytelling of
rooks’. These brief passages set up the tone for the rest of the novel, because
we are left in no doubt that the rooks are always watching.
So, overall, Bellman &Black is a very good, very
readable, very gripping novel.
But it is not The Thirteenth Tale.
I think part of the
problem of my reaction to this novel is that, to me, few novels can beat the
sheer brilliance of Setterfield’s first.
Both novels are
ghost stories, but both novels are also much more than ghost stories. I think
one of the reasons why I prefer The
Thirteenth Tale is connected to this. Where it goes beyond a ghost story it
becomes a story of family, mystery, and of human
people. Where Bellman & Black
goes beyond a ghost story it becomes an allegory, a moral tale. If the novel’s
moral is not to drown reality in work, not to forget the past, not to forget
people or forget to think, then it almost paradoxically drowns out its own
message by being, ultimately, not about people so much as about ideas. William
Bellman is a great character, but he is no Margaret Lee, and he is certainly no
Vida Winter. The novel’s strength is its themes, not its characterisation,
Then there’s also
the ending. Bellman & Black’s ending,
as I have said, was effective. But the concluding chapters of The Thirteenth Tale are far beyond
effective. There is a moment of understanding in that novel when you suddenly think,
Oh wait, hang on a minute... oh! and the
whole novel suddenly makes sense. Everyone who has read The Thirteenth Tale will know the sentence I mean, that astounding moment
of revelation. There is no such moment in Bellman
& Black. The novel does have a climax, but you don’t end up thinking well now everything makes sense so much
as I pretty much already knew that, and
there’s still lots I don’t know. Unlike The
Thirteenth Tale, the novel’s ghostliness isn’t exactly given a satisfactory
explanation. It’s more ambiguous. But perhaps that’s the point, and perhaps I
like that. I haven’t completely decided. But after all, Bellman & Black is not The
Thirteenth Tale and, more importantly, it doesn’t need to be. It’s a
different novel with different aims, themes and outcomes. Once I accepted that I
was able to enjoy Bellman & Black
for what it is: a really good novel, which deserves to be considered in its own
right, not just compared to Setterfield’s first book.
And
I’ve got no doubt I’ll be waiting very eagerly for the next seven-odd years
until her third novel comes out.
Greatest
strength: either
the complexity of its themes, or its eerie atmosphere, which was brilliantly
developed.
Greatest
weakness: I did
find the ending slightly anticlimactic, but I have a sneaking suspicion that
that’s more to do with my opinion of The
Thirteenth Tale than actually to do with Bellman & Black.
Let’s
finish on a quote:
Bellman & Black was teeming with life and money and death.
It was a success.
Next
week: Let’s be hopeful
and say by then I’ll have finished Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
by then.
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