Stephen Gregory (1) (1952–)

Christmas 1966 and the boys at the remote Foxwood Manor boarding school have all gone home for the holidays – except for one. Alan Scott, whose mother has left him to spend Christmas at the school with the headmaster Dr Kemp and his wife. The quiet and calm is shattered when former pupil Martin Pryce arrives with his girlfriend Sophie, hellbent on revenge and destruction…a cat and mouse game ensues, which culminates in a horrific climax on Christmas Day.

Ohhh, I so wanted to like this book. It had a small cast, one location and a claustrophobic atmosphere, all of which should have made this a winner for me. But although I did finish it, it left me cold. I didn’t like any of the characters, not even really the young boy Alan. The book never makes it clear if Martin’s motivation for his actions was genuine or not – was he telling the truth or making things up? Did he even believe what he himself was saying? This is never resolved (possibly deliberately) and the thread is left hanging. There was a supernatural element which didn’t really work for me either, and I could have done without the completely unnecessary side angle of the bird in the barn.

It’s not often a book makes me feel like this, but it left me feeling on a downer and I was very relieved to finish it and move on. It wasn’t that the writing was bad – it wasn’t – and I have to agree that the setting of Foxwood Manor was suitably creepy for a creepy thriller, but unfortunately I did not enjoy this at all, and only finished it because once I start a book I can never let myself not read the whole thing.… (altro)

There is potentially a great short story here, but it gets padded out to novel/novella length and has a couple of other problems. The novel is about possession in its various forms from the supernatural kind we expect to the possessiveness of things, memories, other's lives, the dead, the past, even the future; things we both yearn to possess and those things that possess us.

We scream early on for the protagonist, Christopher Beale, to get out of this madhouse of Chalke House but he is so "possessed" by his nightly drunk and jump nihilism that he barely seems to care what happens except that it makes his summer fun end. We know from his backstory, so reminiscent of Heart of Darkness, that he is one of these people that is trapped by the meaninglessness of it all. Only the admission of his failing father to a nursing home motivates his return to England and his escape from the possession of his daily swirl around the drain of his life as an alcoholic teacher in Borneo, only to end up here in another trap of inaction. He keeps telling us how things are getting back to normal each day in Chalke House only to have them roll out to such bizarre extremes that it's hard to believe he is going to stick around for the sex and alcohol that is keeping him. I guess it's basically Hamlet's dilemma for Beale.

The problem with the whole thing is you are literally bludgeoned by a symbolism that cries out to be more subtle, more metaphoric and not so spelled out. The subtitle is even: A novel of possession. I haven't read anything else by Gregory but here you almost get them impression that he's saying "Look how clever I am with this symbol, It doesn't mean exactly what it seems," where we end up feeling: "well that's exactly what the author means." Because of overuse of the overt symbolic it makes the ending almost inevitable, and the message that we possess almost nothing, seems so obvious, that we really don't care that much about the tragedy that unfolds.

See it could have been great, but for the lack of subtlety.… (altro)