Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray

Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray
Buy Sugar Hall by Tiffany Murray at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: While it might at times have benefitted from a bit more focus, this is still an intelligent and slightly spooky novel.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 260	Date: May 2014
Publisher: Seren
ISBN: 9781781721438
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Sugar Hall is a place of transitions. It has recently gained new residents – Lilia Sugar, and her children Saskia and Dieter. It has lost several portions of the estate, however – several valuable trinkets, the billiard table – as Lilia has to sell things to keep the family from poverty. But apart from things arriving and things going, there are things moving – possibly the objects left, possibly the butterfly patterns on the wallpapers. And there are things appearing – such as a lot of actual, living insects, and the naked boy who sometimes appears only as a disembodied head to the young exploring Dieter…

It took a few pages for me to like the style of this book – not too many, but a notable few. But it was well worth the wait for me to see what the author was doing – creating an artful doldrum for Dieter, to contrast with his previous life. The family had been four persons strong (and the mystery of why one is absent is left up to us to think they got it right), living in the heady days of post-WWII London, and Dieter is much more used to rummaging around in a gang of friends on bomb-sites, than in decaying sheds on a country estate none of the family really wishes to be living at. That fourth member, and the reason for the move, both count as ghosts in this self-declared ghost story, but there are countless more – the naked boy, complete with silver tag around his neck, and in fact the ghosts of what every main character was, is now, and what otherwise might have been…

This is not The Others, this is not The Turn of the Screw, this is not Jo Baker's The Telling, but this is its own beast of a country house ghost story. As befitting any story in a country house there is a class issue as a minor element, while another theme is a recurring mention of the Ruth Ellis hanging trial. And as befitting any country house story the house is a bit of a character here – although not perhaps as much as one could wish.

No, for there's a stronger character, one who turns the story to his path, one who plays the pipes that everyone else dances to. There is a case just over halfway for there being too many of those dancers – not to the book's detriment, but you could imagine a more claustrophobic book, without having cameos from too many people. This in some respect comes down to what kind of book it is. If the house was more of a character, if the haunting was more a chilling ghost story, the book would actually be quite different – and it would really be a ghost story. As it is, the book – like the aforementioned Baker (and I know, because I asked her about it in person) is a ghost story while not belonging in the ghost story genre. It certainly ends with a stereotypical currying of the genre tropes, but before then is something more nuanced – with the flavour of melancholy rather than frights, wistfulness and regret as opposed to shocks.

Therefore one can take a lot of the blurb quotes with a pinch of salt – this is not a book for staying up all night, back to the wall and regretting needing to turn every page. The pages do go sailing by very speedily – especially as all the short chapters are separated by found items – letters, newspaper cuttings, mounted insects… It's one indication among many that this author is interested in narrative as opposed to genre, and with the slight touch to the style I mentioned above might make this a literary fiction book, as opposed to a general fiction read – but doesn't make it a genre piece in line with its subtitle after all. It is on the whole more subtle than that, and as a result deserves a much wider and more general audience.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

For more full-on chills, I can recommend Dolly by Susan Hill. Other people finding their way into a spooky country house mystery through misfortune can be had with The Watcher in the Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

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