The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

I'll admit that my first thought when I put this book down was, "Huh?" I spent most of the book feeling unsure about what was going on, and I concluded the book without really understanding what had happened.

I came into this book cold. Most of the time I at least have some idea what I'm getting into when I pick up a book, but all I knew was that The Turn of the Screw is famous, has been made into a movie or two (more, it turns out, now that I've looked into it), and is on my unwritten list of books/stories I feel like I should read at some point in my life.

For those of you who don't know, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) is a ghost story of sorts. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is the new governess for two children, Miles and Flora, who are under the care of the uncle in London. The two children appear to the governess as the sweetest, most innocent of charges, but early in her stay she detects something amiss, something sinister. As it turns out, the children's former governess died under mysterious circumstances, and the narrator subsequently experiences the horror of seeing apparitions of the former governess and her illicit lover wandering the grounds of the estate. Confiding in the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, the narrator/current governess strives to protect the children from what she is certain are the evil intentions of the two ghosts, while fearing that the children have already been lost.

I was interested enough to be able to finish the novella, but can't say I really cared for it much. Still, the thing that made it difficult for me to read and enjoy is also exactly what intrigues me now that I've finished it. The story is deeply ambiguous. It is a first person narrative, and the narrator is left to draw her own conclusions about the events. Because of this, the reader cannot know for certain if her conclusions, her leaps of logic, and even her strict observations, are to be taken as trustworthy, or merely as her perceptions. Truth about what actually happened is very hard to come by in the narrative. 

But it's not the ambiguity itself that bothered me, it was not knowing how much ambiguity I, as the reader, was actually supposed to read into the narrative. It wasn't clear to me if I was supposed to trust or question the narrator, and therefore it wasn't clear to me how I was supposed to read the narrative.

But like I said, it's also this ambiguity that now intrigues me. Now that I've finished the book and seen how much is left unresolved, it's hard not to think back on what I read. When I got to within one page of the end I had no idea how the story could resolve in just a few more paragraphs, and when I finished those few paragraphs I felt frustrated because I didn't think the story had resolved. But it's left me thinking, particularly about the narrator. What did she experience? What don't we know? If the ghosts were indeed real (apparently there has been some healthy literary debate over this in the last century), what was the nature of the evil they portended?

This is one I feel like I should read again now that I know what I was getting myself into. But I don't know that I actually will.