Book 4 (February, Gothic)White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi
Reason for Reading: This was in many ways the impetus to break from 'classic' novels, based on a very strong recommendation from The Anxious Gamer. It replaced... something older and altogether more conventional to accompany We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and although I have a number of clear commonalities with Oyeyemi as an English-born Cambridge graduate - in the same field as Ore Lind, indeed - it seems unlikely that our experiences as a black woman and a white man would have been similar even there.
White is for Witching weaves the tale of the twins, Eliot and especially Miranda, in a disjointed and experimental fashion, beginning with four decontextualised responses to an unknown questioner before proceeding with four more or less conventional narrative voices: a third person narrative following Miranda, and the first person voices of Eliot, Miranda's university friend Ore, and that of the Silver House (which may actually also be the narrator of Miranda's sections, now I think of it,) a rambling manor which the twins' father runs as a guest house. His wife, a photographer, was killed in Haiti and Miranda wears her watch, set always to Haitian time. Eliot is perhaps a little eccentric, but grounded and part of the wider world. Miranda is lost and distracted, suffering from pica, an eating disorder which compels her to consume whatever will do her no good. Ore is an anchor to Miranda at university, but at the cost of her own self, which is physically whittled away by the relationship. And the house waits, knowing that like all Silvers, Miranda belongs only with, only to it.
I'm going to start off by saying that my reading habits - I mostly get a chance to read on the train to and from work - are not well suited to gothic. I struggled somewhat to get into White is for Witching, and it only really clicked for me about a third of the way through, when Miranda went to Cambridge(1). Perhaps the Silver House was too abstract a place for me to find mysterious, whereas Ore's view of the streets and colleges of my alma mater had the underlying familiarity which allowed it to convert what I know into something uncanny. what has a rambling guest house with too many rooms to do with me, after all, but student dorms cut incongruously into a wall hung heavy with a sepulchral air... that I can be chilled by. With my attention thus grabbed, I found the last third of the book, back in the Silver House near Dover, flowed more easily, and Ore's romantic investment in Miranda gave me more cause to fear for her inevitable doom.
I'm not convinced that the modern Gothic is my natural home (which may be the point, of course,) but while White is for Witching did not grip me as it has some, I certainly don't regret the experience. As an aside on medium, I found it more than usually frustrating to read on a Kindle, because there were many occasions when I wanted to flick back and check my recollection of some small thing, and that is hard to do on a Kindle. I am also sad that this one wasn't available as an audiobook, as I think that, well read and ideally by multiple readers, it could be something very special.
(1) Online reviews seem evenly divided on whether this juncture was when the book came alive or got bogged down.
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