Midsummer ghosts
Jun. 25th, 2006 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWe celebrated the solstice itself at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance'z midsummer ghost stories event: sitting in a magnificent library, surrounded by friends and other congenial people, with a glass of wine to sip and three stories to listen to. The convention is that ghost stories are a seasonal treat of the winter, that the wine should be mulled and the library firelit and full of flickering shadows; it's always a pleasure to go against convention.
So these three stories were set in the summer, and unrolled, (assamarcand points out) if not in the sunshine - this is an English summer, after all - at least by daylight. Sean O'Brien's story looks back to the early 1960s, and tells the tale of an amateur cricket match, with the team travelling to an unfamiliar location to play a fixture with - well, that would be telling. It isn't quite the kind of match that has come to represent a lost arcadian English summer - it is played on neglected pitches in depressed urban fringes, not on the village green surrounded by thatched cottages - but it does tap into a similar nostalgia, even as it looks back to the horrors of an earlier lost generation.
Gail-Nina's story was lighter in tone, though she did not carry out her threat to call it The Ghost of a Strawberry: it was The Parasol, and, like the eponymous parasol, a fragile and frothy confection, with a spike. There is some sharp characterisation and the tone is light, as the narrator tells how she came to buy the parasol, and how she is haunted by the idea of its original owner, a Victorian (or was she Edwardian?) beauty - but the overall impression is of wistfulness as much as humour.
desperance read last, and although he attempts to explain this away on the grounds that his story, Summer's Lease, is by far the longest, it is also the case that it is the most powerful of the three, and would have been an impossibly hard act to follow. It's the story of "my Brideshead summer", says the narrator; one of the interesting things about the ghost story as a genre is the extent to which the author can acknowledge that this is a story, that there will be ghosts, that things will turn out badly, without spoiling the impact of events, without sacrificing tension. On the contrary.
After these reminders that summer is fleeting, we drove north to Holy Island, crossing the causeway at 10.30, with the last of the day's light.
desperance'z midsummer ghost stories event: sitting in a magnificent library, surrounded by friends and other congenial people, with a glass of wine to sip and three stories to listen to. The convention is that ghost stories are a seasonal treat of the winter, that the wine should be mulled and the library firelit and full of flickering shadows; it's always a pleasure to go against convention.So these three stories were set in the summer, and unrolled, (as
samarcand points out) if not in the sunshine - this is an English summer, after all - at least by daylight. Sean O'Brien's story looks back to the early 1960s, and tells the tale of an amateur cricket match, with the team travelling to an unfamiliar location to play a fixture with - well, that would be telling. It isn't quite the kind of match that has come to represent a lost arcadian English summer - it is played on neglected pitches in depressed urban fringes, not on the village green surrounded by thatched cottages - but it does tap into a similar nostalgia, even as it looks back to the horrors of an earlier lost generation.Gail-Nina's story was lighter in tone, though she did not carry out her threat to call it The Ghost of a Strawberry: it was The Parasol, and, like the eponymous parasol, a fragile and frothy confection, with a spike. There is some sharp characterisation and the tone is light, as the narrator tells how she came to buy the parasol, and how she is haunted by the idea of its original owner, a Victorian (or was she Edwardian?) beauty - but the overall impression is of wistfulness as much as humour.
desperance read last, and although he attempts to explain this away on the grounds that his story, Summer's Lease, is by far the longest, it is also the case that it is the most powerful of the three, and would have been an impossibly hard act to follow. It's the story of "my Brideshead summer", says the narrator; one of the interesting things about the ghost story as a genre is the extent to which the author can acknowledge that this is a story, that there will be ghosts, that things will turn out badly, without spoiling the impact of events, without sacrificing tension. On the contrary.After these reminders that summer is fleeting, we drove north to Holy Island, crossing the causeway at 10.30, with the last of the day's light.
