A Foothold in Coordinated Triangulation – a great ghost story that benefits from sharing…

FOOTHOLD by Elizabeth Bowen

“(I like the third person imperative.)”

…’Let it howl’, as imperative — the wind. And at the end the wind fidgets the curtain and I believe THAT is Clara, the ghost behind the curtain blaming wind for her shape being able to shape it out as her shape. But that’s just me!

The ghost has got or is getting a foothold here, called Clara, as we earlier came down to breakfast, but the butler has not yet brought the boiled eggs. Thomas is staying with a married couple Janet and Gerard in their new mansion where Janet, to her husband’s worrying chagrin, has sort of set the ghost going from her mind, and it has now become arguably real. With Thomas seeing it and then he suspects Gerard sees it, too, at the end, after circling the port, and as Thomas can’t find the light switch on the landing, listening to Janet in her room talking to Clara… And, in between the breakfast and the end, there is the most complex Proustian, Aickmanesque paradox of unending time and half-atmospheres, but essentially a Bowendigo of meticulous and stylistically difficult, endlessly interpretable, interaction between the three people and the ghost, but whose is the Shadowy Third’s imperative? With much prose tactility of decoration & fabric words and psychological furniture (“It wears the material veil pretty thin”) and breakfast food, and yes, port, and talk of dogs and the couple’s distant, but still growing up children. Thomas wants to retire as a writer into Proust… while reading this story is like (its own) “losing a book in the move, knowing one can’t really have lost it, that it must have got into the shelves somewhere, but not being able to trace it.” It has a foothold somewhere other than in what you can grasp.

Some important passages…[…]

THE FULL TEXT OF THIS REVIEW HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/849-2/#comment-786

All my EB story reviews so far: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/

Note my long held beliefs shown in public about readers triangulating coordinates in gestalt real-time reviewing!

Elizabeth Bowen’s own triangulating signal—