The Thirteenth Tale
Some story tellers captivate readers with the atmospheric moods their stories take on, with the dynamic characters—both good and bad and complicated, like all of us—that populate their pages, with the clever plot twists, the unexpected sown into the story seamlessly. One such spinner of tales is Diane Setterfield. Her most recent novel, Once Upon A River (2018) was one of the first I reviewed on LitReaderNotes nearly three years ago; it is a captivating and haunting story that I utterly loved. Ever since reading that masterfully written novel, Dickensian in style, I have longed to read her first novel: The Thirteenth Tale (2006). This fall, I finally picked up The Thirteenth Tale and its gothic tone felt perfectly suited to the season in which I was reading.
If Once Upon A River drew upon the Victorian novel for inspiration, The Thirteenth Tale is an homage of sorts to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Copies of the book itself appear throughout the story, as do character, plot, and setting parallels. Yes, there is a mysterious family estate said to be haunted. Yes, there is a governess. But the parallels between the two are not overly done, and The Thirteenth Tale incorporates plenty of other literary devices as it leads its reader down a windy path, uncovering truth and connecting the dots in a mystery of myriad layers.
The Thirteenth Tale is a first-person story told from young Margaret Lea’s point of view. Margaret is a rare book seller’s daughter and an amateur biographer, and it seems from the first, a bit a recluse. She is startled, then, to find herself summoned by the most famous English writer of the age, Vida Winter. As Miss Winter, the beloved novelist of whose personal life so little is known, faces old age and death, she determines to tell her story; she has selected Margaret to be her audience and subsequent biographer. Winter’s life is as mysterious as the strange gothic mood that quickly emerges in the book.
Parallel to the story of Margaret and Miss Winter then, Setterfield weaves in a second plotline through the stories Winter shares with her would be biographer. This second plot takes the reader (and Margaret) back in time to unravel an ominous mystery. Both the memories and the contemporary story take place among gothic settings: the dilapidated Anglefield family seat and Miss Winter’s vast estate amidst the moorlands of Northern England. Both estates are isolated and punctuated by mysterious happenings, even ghosts. The setting, as well as some of the characters, lead to several very eerie moments when I found myself holding my breath. Yet, as with her previous Once Upon a River, all the ghost stories and strangeness have a rational explanation, and after a number of plot twists and ah-ha moments on the part of the reader, Setterfield resolves the mysteries brilliantly.
In The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield captures humanity at its grittiest, nastiest, most base, without fixating on it with a voyeur’s hungry gaze. There is one character in The Thirteenth Tale who is a monster with his lascivious predation of young girls. His violent nature turns upon himself as often as it does others, however, and his life is misery. While his person is central to the novel’s plot, his character is not. Setterfield masterfully inserts his incestuous, predatory beastliness into her novel without allowing him to overwhelm it. I find this element of Setterfield’s writing both fantastic and inspiring. She recognizes and incorporates humanity’s most ugly into her story without allowing those elements to distract her reader from her main characters.
The Thirteenth Tale examines themes of birth, inheritance, family lore, twins, grief, and Truth (yes, with a capital “T”). It plays with fairy tales and memoir, biography and sleuthing, and the complex nature of family. If you enjoy a gothic read, a ghostly tale, a mystery, this is a book you will certainly enjoy. And, I will add, this book is a perfect autumnal read; perfect for cozying up with on a chill fall day.
Bibliography:
Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale. Atria Books: 2006.
A Few Great Passages:
“I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions. Just so long as they don’t start on about storytelling and honesty, the way some of them do. Naturally that annoys me. Not provided they leave me alone, I won’t hurt them.
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a status of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie” (5).
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For ion the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic” (17).
“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that” (289-290).
“’Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can’t say you haven’t got them. Same goes for stories” (300).
“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all” (389).
