Owned: No, library
Page count: 355
My summary: Lily Bell wants to be an actress. So when the Ghost Professor comes to her door offering her a role, she accepts with delight. But there is more behind Erasmus Salt’s production than a simple play. Lily is assured that the obituary in the newspaper and headstone in the graveyard are just props. But more and more the trap keeps closing in...
My rating: 2.5/5
My commentary:
If you know me, you know that I love the Victorians. I just think they were so interesting - the contradictions of Victorian culture, the rapid expansion and industrialisation, the huge gap between rich and poor. If you know me well, you will also know that I have a huge affection for the magic trick known as Pepper’s Ghost. This book’s about a girl who plays a ghost onstage in the Victorian era. Reader, I thought this’d be a no-brainer. In fact...meh?
Let’s start with our protagonist, Lily. My biggest problem with Lily was how passive and naive a character she was. It’s pretty clear from day one that Salt is bad news, but she spends so much page time wondering what’s going on when the reader has figured it out chapters ago. It’s only in the last third that she really gains any kind of active involvement in the plot, and even then, it isn’t much. It’s disappointing, because a young Victorian woman who aspires to being an actress is actually a pretty interesting character concept, but here it just falls flat on its face.
Erasmus Salt, to me, represents the narrative’s biggest misstep. See, you figure out that he’s got this weird Oedipal thing going on with his dead mum, who he saw die and whose death led him to becoming the ghost professor and wanting to bring back real ghosts. He targets girls with his mother’s long pale hair to be his ghost, and is sexually involved with girls that remind him of his mother. (Ew.) But when do we learn this? First third of the story. For my money, this is a massive mistake, because it shifts the narrative focus from ‘what is Salt doing and why?’ to ‘can Lily escape it?’, which is a less interesting story because she doesn’t do anything. Also, he’s not any more developed, really, than that summary I just gave you, which renders him something of a flat character.
Faye is Salt’s sister, and has the more interesting developing story, in that we learn her history gradually as the plot progresses. Her whole deal isn’t hard to work out, admittedly, but points for preserving some mystery, I guess. She had a kid in the past that she had to give up, and covets Lily’s kid as her own as a way of dealing with that grief. But overall, she’s not very interesting either. Sorry, I keep wanting to come up with more stuff to talk about, but this book was just completely uninteresting.
Next up, we’re back to Animorphs, and Jake’s in trouble...
“It’s a story that starts at its end, in death. We have an evocation of a life which has been lost, which then becomes another kind of life, one whose presence or absence is conjured up in various states of remembrance.”
