The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel
by Diane Setterfield
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Book Reviews of The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel
Book Review: Don't Take This Book to Bed With You!
Summary: 5 Stars
It starts out well. Our heroine, Margaret, is the daughter of a dealer in old and rare books, the kind that can support the family on a handful of special sales per year. She has worked with her quietly doting father from earliest childhood, learning to love both their trade and the many books upon their shelves. Then, on a day like any other, she receives a summons from the most published, and yet personally unknown, author in England. Vida Winters, known for telling a new and different scenario to reporters whenever asked about her past, has decided to finally tell the true story of her life to someone, and she has chosen Margaret.
Leaving the shop, her agoraphobic and distant mother, and her beloved books, Margaret takes with her a ream of paper, twelve shiny red pencils, and the discovered secret that her parents think is safely sealed away in a tin under the bed.
Miss Winters' story, she says, must be told in its proper order, without interruption by questions, with no looking ahead. And she must tell it before the wolf, eating her from the inside, finishes her storytelling forever. Margaret's plan to decline the job suddenly is overwhelmed by the hints of love, loss, tragedy, and deranged secrets.
The daily sessions of story-telling begin with the loss of a mother, the depression of a father, and the rearing of the product of their union. And then the story begins to darken.
Ms. Setterfield creates, with a masterful use of vocabulary and phrasing, a virtual "train wreck" of events. As the reader watches the engine approach, an inner sense of disaster perceives that the trestle ahead is weak. One by one the cars of the train follow along, swaying and groaning with the stress, starting to tumble into the abyss. Surely the train will stop and the last few cars, at least, will remain in safety. Surely the disaster cannot become worse....
Raised in a house with a reclusive uncle, a housekeeper with dementia, and a taciturn gardener, young Vida suddenly finds herself in charge of the comings and goings of all the residents of the lonely estate, responsible for their needs and for keeping anyone living in the village from intruding on their lair lest they find out their gruesome secrets.
When it seems impossible for any good ending (happy is perhaps too strong a word here), Ms. Setterfield snatches real life away from the horrors of the fire and the insanity, and carefully wraps up all the stories in a satisfactory manner. Whew!
A good, and compelling, read, The Thirteenth Tale will hold your attention and require you to continue to the very end.
Just don't take this book to bed with you.
Book Review: Is this tale for you? Maybe.
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoyed this book, but reading through the reviews I found some common threads among those who didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I. Here are those common threads and my thoughts on them, to help you decide if this book is for you.
- Based upon some very good reviews, many expected this debut novel to be the next 'Jane Eyre' (or another one of their classic favorites - so nothing could compete)
- They wanted a fast-paced page-turner mystery (and this book, though engaging is not that).
- The saga of a dysfunctional family in a mansion was not what they expected (or wanted)
- It took too many words to say too little to many - and the beginning was slow.
My thoughts:
1. The prose in this book is 5-star worthy. Setterfield does know how to write!
2. The book reminded me throughout of some of my favorite childhood books - The Secret Garden (Aladdin Classics) and Flowers in the Attic (Dollanganger) - but now written for adults. Negative reviewers often said the same thing - they just didn't particularly like those books.
3. The pace of this book is slower - doled out over meetings between the two protagonists. It is not an "I can't put this down" type book. It is, however, an "I'm looking forward to the next time I can pick it up" type book.
4. You can't help but not like, the main character, Lea and the biographer and the custodian of stories.She's a fellow book lover, as she says "As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend books....Do they sense it these dead writers when their books are read? Is their soul touched ... by another mind reading theirs. I do hope so."
5. The story is engaging, the premise is different and while a long book --- it spans over 120 years of unique family history and several plots--- it's done well so each chapter is often a nice tale within itself, but with bigger questions still to be answered.
6. It does start out particularly slowly --- allow yourself the first 50 pages or so to ease into this book like you would a warm bath, before you write it off.
BOTTOM LINE: Is this book for you? If you're expecting a good read about interesting characters and liked V.C. Andrews as a child - then you'll probably enjoy this one. If you're expecting a fast-paced page turning mystery instead of the interesting story of Vida Winter and how she came to be who she was and the relationships she had, then you'd best look elsewhere.
Book Review: A little heavy on the dysfunctional, but still a great read
Summary: 4 Stars
Unsettling and gothic in its mood, and disturbingly eerie in its setting, Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale is a homage to the classic gothic Victorian novel. The author establishes a strange atmosphere, one that gets under your skin. One gets the sense that all is not right in Angelfield household, and that there is some startling or bizarre twist that is going to come out and shock or disturb the reader.
The novel is a ghost story in a sense, as each of the main two characters, Margaret Lea and Vida Winter, have untold pasts that come to haunt each in its own way. There are apparitions that seemingly cross Margaret's eyes, but then there are painful memories from the past that, when revealed, are more haunting. When Miss Lea, a biographer, goes to Vida Winter's residence with the opportunity of learning the renown author's life story, she not only opens up the door to the secrets of Winter's life, but her own.
One enjoyable aspect of Setterfield's work is the mysteriousness that rings forth. The author does enough to hold the reader in suspense all the while giving some insight into the background of the Angelfield household. The ominous appearance of Miss Winter's house is depicted early on: "Barred shutters blacked out the windows and there was not a single sign of human habitation. Closed in upon itself, the place seemed to shun visitors" (37). Miss Winter's failing health seems to add to the dreariness of the setting, and she slowly divulges the bizarre family secrets of Charlie, Isabelle, George Angelfield, Hester, Dr. Maudsley, and the mysterious twins, Adeline and Emmeline. Before everything is over, there will be a fire that sets in motion much tragedy for Miss Winter's family, and mistaken identities will be revealed. The author does enough to keep the wheels in motion, giving you little glimpses here and there so you can try to figure out what will happen next.
While I enjoyed the effort at creating mystery and mood, the overabundance of dysfunction was less-than-appealing. Between insane asylums, incest, murder, deadly fires, affairs, the book goes from Gothic to downright morbid at times. The shocking moments were attempts at furthering the plot and characterization, but come across as a means of gaining cheap "shock value", tabloid-type popularity.
However, the one hiccup doesn't detract from the over all impact of the book. It is a great novel to read on a cold, winter's night when you are thinking about curling up with a good mystery. I don't think it is quite five star material, but the next best thing.
Book Review: A Modern Book in the Grand Old Tradition
Summary: 5 Stars
A young, innocent, perhaps even naļve character finds herself in the employ of a mysterious person in an isolated mansion. Mysteries abound -- about her employer, and about things the household is hiding from her.
Jane Eyre? Nice guess, and indeed, Diane Setterfield does borrow heavily from the gothic tradition that gave us such classics as Jane Eyre, or Rebecca,but her creation is wholly modern, with just a touch of the salacious depravity of V.C. Andrews.
Our bookish heroine is Margaret Lea, an avid reader and sometimes writer, who has been invited by the mysterious authoress, Vida Winter, to write a biography. Winter (a pen name) has given numerous accounts of her life, but no two are the same. She promises the young Lea, however, the truth.
And she delivers it -- in all its lurid detail. It would be almost difficult to keep up, if Winter weren't such a firm believer in all stories having a definite beginning, middle, and end (a philosophy I happen to like!). Following the twists and turns of Vida Winter's life as she tells of Adeline Angelfield and her twin sister Emmeline, whom she says died in a horrible fire, and whose parentage is rumored to be incestuous, is horrifying and spellbinding. Growing up in a mad house full of mad people can't have been easy. It seems obvious why she has sheltered under a pen name and behind fictitious stories.
I was simply fascinated by this page-turner of a novel. It is clearly an homage to gothic classics, but I love that it isn't really historical fiction. (Although, obviously, since Vida Winter is telling about her long-forgotten past, most of the action does take place in an earlier time, but still within the 20th century.)
Yet, I loved the book's old-fashioned feel and the use of framing -- which I don't think I've seen in a long time. However, don't be prepared for a squeaky clean novel that you'd give to a younger child -- the story's twists and turns are sometimes lurid, often morbid, and almost always disturbing. While I think it is unfair to dismiss this novel (as some have done) as no better than V.C. Andrews, there is a touch of the Andrews style there. Of course, Andrews tips her hat to the gothic novel in her own way, so perhaps this isn't a surprise. There is enough to satisfy a literary reader here.
This book is simply a rollercoaster that left me all but breathless at the end. While some things were easily guessed, others simply knocked me off my chair. This has to be one of the best books I've read in a long, long, time.
Book Review: Yeah, um... no.
Summary: 2 Stars
This was recommended to me by multiple people. Much like The Historian, this book seems written to appeal to a certain kind of reader-- Academic Gothic? Something like that.
I was distinctly bored and annoyed throughout the book. This despite Setterfield's obvious skill with prose. In fact, her skill made it worse for me, because I kept hoping for more. Her skill was willing, but the plot was seriously weak.
What didn't I like about the plot? It feels sort of unfair to say: "everything", but that comes kind of close as a description. First of all, we are expected to believe that there is a literary fiction novelist who has somehow become a gazillionaire through her writing and who has managed to keep her background entirely mysterious. That's the first thing that we are expected to swallow. Second of all, we're meant to believe that said superfamousrich writer chooses a little known bookish academic to write her memoirs. It is very quickly obvious that these memoirs will include some Deep Dark Sekret which will unfold with the novel.
Okay, so that's the set up. Which would be bad enough if the details weren't also so obviously unrealistic and annoying. For instance, the Internet doesn't seem to exist. Research and correspondence have to be carried out by post. This wouldn't be that bad if there were something to indicate that the book was meant to have happened in the past-- but we aren't given any sense of time. I was left with the conclusion that a Google search for information just didn't seem Gothic enough for Setterfield. There were several moments like this where I felt as though the book did violence to my sense of credulity. Just didn't buy it.
And the ending-- I just won't go there. Suffice to say that to call it contrived is kind of an insult to artifice.
This book is often compared to The Shadow of the Wind. I didn't love that book either, but it is head and shoulders above The Thirteenth Tale.
I have no idea why so many people find this book so compelling. To my mind it is-- at best-- a reasonably good airplane book which is more or less ruined by its pretensions. Please, Ms. Setterfield, you clearly have quite a bit of talent-- please find a plot/subject more fitting to those talents. I love the Brontė sisters as much as the next person, but this book just didn't work.