The Thirteenth Tale

 The Thirteenth Tale

By Diane Setterfield

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness—featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

I hated all of the characters, but I enjoyed the plot!  As was probably to be expected, since this whole thing was steeped in gothic overtones, and involved terrible family members and secret babies and incest and murder children.  I mean, I say all that, and I'm like, "Heck, yeah! I love murder children!" but I spent most of the book so over everyone's antics and trying to figure out how Vida Winter was lying, since she definitely was, and it was annoyingly distracting.  Also, I hated Aurelius.  So you were abandoned as a baby! So your ancestral home burnt down in a terrible fire! So the woman you believed to be your mother denied your existence! Get over it!  

 

Not to mention the narrator's obsession with her conjoined twin, which she dealt with like her parents (mother, really) murdered her in front of Margaret Lea and spat on the grave. Hey, maybe it's okay for your parents not to have told you at age 5 about a really traumatic thing that happened to them when you were barely born.  It's not such a personal betrayal that you then need to spend twenty years investigating twins to make up for it.  Everybody decided to be THE MOST DRAMATIC that they could be, and it drove me crazy.  But not like, proactively dramatic.  More like, laying across the divan, with your hand across your forehead, saying, "What is to become of us now?!"

The whole twin thing was so overweening, in fact, that I do blame it for not realizing that there were three kids involved in the main storyline. Alright, that's not really true, I picked up on some hints, but thought it was a blonde boy, haha, who didn't look like the "emerald-eyed, red-haired" twins. I'm not sure why I thought he was blonde, but you know, that's on me.  By the end of the book, I did begrudgingly think that it was very cleverly done, a-ha, now all those parts of the story make sense again, but I'm still not going to re-read any of it. 

I very much craved a Cold Comfort Farm Flora who could have shown up, put all of these ridiculous doom-and-gloom ("That twin jest ain't right") matters to rights and sent everyone on their way.  I had high hopes for Hester, in fact, and her section was when I started making better progress in the book, but of course she had to buy into some weird twin-eugenics ideas and end up succumbing to the general atmosphere.  I think that's partly why I liked Mexican Gothic so much: yes, everybody was off their rockers, but they were being poisoned by fungi!  It made sense!  They were Yellow Wallpapering because the actual wallpaper was killing them!  I mean, maybe that's the case here, there is a wealth of description about how terrible the house is, and it's moldy and falling in, so maybe there's bad mushrooms to blame here too. 

But in the end, do we even really need poisonous mushrooms?  Since it turns out there's one stupid twin, and one violent twin, and one girl who was pretending she didn't exist (for reasons that are still unclear - just tell the lawyer that Charlie had a baby, it's not like Charlie is going to gainsay you) and everything is perfectly in character from thence on.  And I suppose the twins' eccentricities can be explained because incest, and Charlie and Isabelle's eccentricities can be explained by oh, wait, nevermind, I guess we do need poisonous mushrooms after all because otherwise I guess it's just a freaky family of sadists and the stoic servants who enable them. 

For all that it has mysteries, in the end, I wondered whether or not this really was a "book about a secret" but I suppose Vida Winter's true identity has been a secret (twice over), not to mention the fact that she kind of murdered the wrong twin, and then kept the other one holed up in her house for sixty years. So, yeah, okay it works.

 25: A Book about a Secret