#Spooktober-‘The Crow Garden’ by Alison Littlewood

About the book…

‘There’s an amazing sense of place and time in this novel, as Littlewood perfectly captures the literary style, attitudes, and class consciousness of Victorian England’ – Publishers Weekly

Susan Hill meets Alfred Hitchcock in Alison Littlewood’s latest chiller: mad-doctor Nathaniel is obsessed with the beautiful Mrs Harleston – but is she truly delusional? Or is she hiding secrets that should never be uncovered …?

Haunted by his father’s suicide, Nathaniel Kerner walks away from the highly prestigious life of a consultant to become a mad-doctor. He takes up a position at Crakethorne Asylum, but the proprietor is more interested in phrenology and his growing collection of skulls than the patients’ minds. Nathaniel’s only interesting case is Mrs Victoria Harleston: her husband accuses her of hysteria and delusions – but she accuses him of hiding secrets far more terrible.

Nathaniel is increasingly obsessed with Victoria, but when he has her mesmerised, there are unexpected results: Victoria starts hearing voices, the way she used to – her grandmother always claimed they came from beyond the grave – but it also unleashes her own powers of mesmerism …and a desperate need to escape.

Increasingly besotted, Nathaniel finds himself caught up in a world of seances and stage mesmerism in his bid to find Victoria and save her.

But constantly hanging over him is this warning: that doctors are apt to catch the diseases with which they are surrounded – whether of the body or the mind.

Is madness contagious?

By dint of being a ‘mad doctor’, a precursor,one imagines,to the more respected field of psychoanalysis which was in its very fetal stages at the time this book is set,Nathaniel Kerner’s decision to move to a Yorkshire set asylum, inhabited by women placed there by their husbands, seems certifiable.

In the grounds of Crakethorne is the Crow Garden, a graveyard of the patients who have died there and that motif is so well used, Nathaniel sees these wretched souls as having been failed by their doctors and here he may succeed rather than add to the sorry lot of inhabitants.

His ideas of what we now consider talking therapy were fighting the more traditional explanations of basically being a woman with your own mind.

The reasons for placing a person in an asylum were mostly based on their sex and if you care to look it up, there are some very tenuous diagnoses such as reading too much…..

The ‘treatments’ are barbaric, including water torture and basically beating the personality out of the person until you are left with a shambling mess.

These people were taken out of polite society so that no one could see them which also means anything could be done to them in the name of ‘research’, with little to no objection.

Who would listen to the reasonings of those committed to an asylum?

The fine line between madness and sanity wrestles through the novel in Nathan’s mind as he becomes infatuated with a woman, Vita, committed by her husband.

Her claims are wild and unsettling,especially that she hears voices and given the Victorian interest in spiritualism versus burgeoning science, Nathan listens to her and sees a potential way to cure her.

But when he begins to hear voices himself,is that the power of suggestion or something more sinister trying to work through him?

And if he does manage to cure Vita, will it bring him some respite from his wretched guilt over his father’s suicide?

A fascinating and deeply chilling novel on how we perceive and treat -or rather hide away-the mentally challenged , it really made me reflect in how far we have come in the field of mental health. Or rather, we have not in so many ways.

This book touched me on a personal level , the stories which are told through my family reflect resilience in the face of public opinion at a time when locking away the obviously mentally afflicted was the thing to do.

There were so many instances of chances missed and legacies handed down because of the poor treatment of those with depression, or brain damage, that even so far after the Victorian age, we still have such a long long way to go.

About the author…

Alison Littlewood was raised in Penistone, South Yorkshire, and went on to attend the University of Northumbria at Newcastle (now Northumbria University). Originally she planned to study graphic design, but “missed the words too much” and switched to a joint English and History degree. She followed a career in marketing before developing her love of writing fiction.

Her first book, ‘A Cold Season’ (2011), was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club and described as ‘perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.’ This was followed by ‘A Cold Silence’,‘The Unquiet House’, ‘Path of Needles’
Alison’s latest novels are ‘The Crow Garden'(2017),a tale of obsession set amidst Victorian asylums and séance rooms, which was followed by the ‘The Hidden People’

I am incredibbly excited about the newest release, ‘Mistletoe’ available from 03/10/2019 published in hardback by Quercus/

You can find her living with her partner Fergus in deepest Yorkshire, England, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls. She loves exploring the hills and dales with her two hugely enthusiastic Dalmatians and has a penchant for books on folklore and weird history, Earl Grey tea and semicolons.

Links-http://www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk/about-the-author/