So... owning up time. Who else always gets this one confused with Silas Marner?
Just me? Good good.
Right, I picked this one up in the secondhand bookshop, knowing nothing more about it that it was apparently a Gothic, and it was written by the same guy who did Carmilla. It was pretty much what you'd expect. Heiresses! Crumbling stately homes! Evil plots! Laudanum! Trains!
As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this one, but struggled to take it particularly seriously. It was quite predictable, and like many Romances of Terror, if you look at things from a plot perspective, it didn't really deliver on many of its promises.
That said, there are a few things to be said for it - firstly, Silas Ruthyn himself is one heck of dish. Quite the silver fox, much prone to dabbing his temples with cologne and sighing about all the bungling fuckwits by whom he has the misfortune to be surrounded. Honestly, from a slightly biased perspective, I would say the character was wasted and we could have done with a lot more of him - but then I have a type.
Secondly, and because this is a respectable literary blog (I say, as you all collapse in to laughter) I was quite taken with Le Fanu's clarity and precision. Uncle Silas is what happens when Northanger Abbey meets Udolpho - Le Fanu recongises that county men and respectable countries are as full of rogues and abusers as the most fantastical stories, it is only that the villains must comport themselves more carefully. The blending of modernity - at least, for the time of writing - and isolation was really powerful. Rather than Stoker's triumphalist use of technology, the railway in Uncle Silas simply makes the world feel smaller, more limited. It offers no escape to our protagonist, only faster transport for her persecutors.
Le Fanu also came through in his fairness both to young female characters, and female friendship. Barring Silas himself, and Dr Bryerly, the male characters we encounter are relatively anodyne. For all the men drive the plot, they are not a patch on the vividness of Milly, Meg, or even Madame de la Rougierre - who may not actually do much, but who remain with you. Milly and Maud's friendship, especially, was delightful to read.
I won't mince words - Maud Ruthyn herself is something of a drip. She does not have the poise or intelligence of Carmilla's narrator, and occasionally I wanted to smack her across the side of the head, but even still, Le Fanu is fair to her. She is shown to grow over the course of the novel, and her adult commentary on her youthful follies are quite incisive. Despite all her silliness, she is never treated as a joke, or deserving of suffering - yet neither is her lack of worldliness of common-bloody-sense held up some sort of unrealistic paradigm of virtue. She's immature - that's all.
I like that about Le Fanu - while I might not agree with everything he writes about gender, he didn't hate teenage girls.
Naturally, it was written in the 1860s, so warnings apply for all the usual 'hilarious' and 'shifty' bumpkins, virulent antisemitism, fetishing of Romany culture, and 'sinister foriegners'. I do so wish they wouldn't.
But, aside from that, an absolutely fine Gothic novel. Better than Udolpho, although that isn't difficult.
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