The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Lest you get the wrong idea, I want to start out by saying that I liked this book. It just took some time before it grew on me.

Like a lot of people, I love books. But there are different kinds of book lovers. I like brightly-lit and well-organized Borders bookstores, trade paperbacks, authors who write well but without frills or pretensions, copyright dates within a few years of the present. Other people like classics, searching for gems in small and cluttered floor-to-ceiling used bookshops, solidly-bound hardbacks, first-editions. These are far from the only categories—every reader has his or her own preferences. But the reason this book was difficult for me to get into was that it seemed to speak to that second category of reader, a category that I definitely am not. I have read my fair share of the classics, to be sure. It’s usually for the sake of being well-read, but I also usually really enjoy what I read (Les Miserables is what I claim for my favorite book of all time). But that’s not what I naturally gravitate towards.

The whole book had a feeling of oldness to it, literary oldness. The primary setting was in the present day, but the narrator lived in a world of old dusty volumes and handwritten letters and dampness and deep sorrow, and it was just difficult to relate to that. It evokes the English gothic novel (think Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre), and this is a genre/period that I’m particularly unfamiliar with. I’ve tried to read Wuthering Heights three times now and just can’t get past the first 50 pages. Older English literature in general has never really appealed to me for some reason (though I’m a huge fan of British humorists like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde).

All this is why when I first began reading the book, I wasn’t sure I’d like it. In fact, if I hadn’t read so many great reviews beforehand, and if I hadn’t bought it specifically for the purpose of reading on the airplane, I might have given up altogether after the first several chapters. Several months ago I picked it up in the bookstore and almost gave up after the first chapter.

But because I had all the time in the world on my flight from Detroit to Los Angeles to become engrossed in the story, I did become engrossed in the story, and while I never quite shook my discomfort with the style and general feel of the book, the story was too compelling to put it down. I still had a hundred or so pages left after two cross-country flights, but when I got home I finished in just a couple sittings.

Vida Winter is a famous novelist, made even more famous by the fact that she has kept her past a secret for decades, telling a new (but inevitably fictional) tale to every potential biographer. Now she is dying, and is at last ready to tell her story, to Margaret Lea, a young woman and book lover who Vida Winter has specifically sought out for the task. But the telling does not come easily, and even as Ms. Winter narrates a gothic account of her troubled childhood home at Angelfield Hall, complete with ghosts, tragedy, dark secrets, and twisted family relationships, there are pieces missing that Margaret (and the reader) are left to puzzle out. Although the full story only becomes clear at the very end, I never felt like the author was deliberately hiding it from me—I was free to puzzle it out myself, and when I figured things out a step before the narrative, I never felt cheated, nor did I feel like I had cheated. The clues were all there and half the fun was trying to put the pieces together.

So in the end, although I had my doubts initially, I enjoyed the book, and I think I would recommend it.