By Anbara Salam; reviewed by Jeannette Hartman
Robert Hazard seems to be the perfect husband. He “was the one who always knew how to make things right, to think practically, to be rational, reasonable.” Raised in an orphanage, he’d grown up to become an accountant.
While his wife Evelyn’s family thinks she should have married a man with more class and more earning power, Evelyn loves him.
So it was all the more shocking when he shyly, proudly, announces he can talk to dead people. Robert asks her to go to talks at spiritualism library with him. Evelyn is horrified. It’s not rational.
But in 1923 just after the end of the Great War and the influenza pandemic, many people are longing to know their late loved ones are well.
“Shiny headstones on empty graves. Jimmy’s fractured pocket watch in a box on Mrs. McLaren’s mantelpiece. Beds dressed in stale linens in shut-up rooms. The blacked-out telephone numbers in her address book. Ghosts were in every corner of every room.”
Evelyn well knows the grief and emptiness of losing someone. Her older sister Dolores died four years earlier of influenza. She was a protector, a problem-solver and knew every secret of Evelyn’s life.
When Evelyn consults the doctor about Robert’s claim, he tells her there are only three options. The first is that Robert is telling the truth; the second is that he only thinks he’s talking to the dead and is insane; or, lastly, he can’t talk to the dead and knows he can’t, and is thus a fraud.
Soon, Robert is invited to demonstrate his abilities at the local spiritualism society. He’s invited to go on tour with a child prodigy who talks to the dead. Their presentations attract attention among the rich and well-connected. Robert is invited to their homes to give private seances.
Where Evelyn’s husband was once lackluster to her family, he’s now someone to envy for the circles he’s moving in. But as the parties get wilder with alcohol, drugs, late nights and risky behavior, Evelyn becomes more unsettled.
Flush with the success of his efforts, Robert comes up with a grand scheme to prove the powers of spiritualism: the society will bring all its powers to find a missing boy. The effort is endorsed by his powerful new friends.
But Evelyn is left wondering about the doctor’s three options and which best describes her husband.
This is a wonderful story about perception and reality. The transformation that Evelyn goes through from concerned wife and skeptic to fearful half-believer is deliciously suspenseful. There is real evolution of character taking place here. But doubts can run two ways. In the end what matters is who has the more powerful believers.
If spiritualism or spirits interest you, check out MR. SCARLETTI’S GHOST and A CASE OF DOUBTFUL DEATH, both by Linda Stratmann, or THE HAUNTING OF MADDY CLARE by Simone St. James.
The Author: Anbara Salam
Anbara Salam is half-Palestinian and half-Scottish. She was raised in London.
Her debut novel was THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL (2018), about the violent unraveling of two missionaries. To write it, she drew on the six months she spent working on a small island in the South Pacific. It was followed by BELLADONNA (2020), a coming of age novel set in Italy in the 1950s.
She earned a doctorate in theology at Oxford University in 2014, after studying in Beirut and York. She lives in Oxford.
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