In Alice
Sees Ghosts by Daisy Rockwell, ghosts flit across the pages and in a
whimsical departure from the prevailing norm, these manifestations mean no
harm. There is nothing of the gruesome or the grotesque here even when
skeletons tumble out of the closet in somewhat cliched and entirely bloodless
fashion. Their purpose is to largely help out in legal matters related to
property disputes and annuities. As anyone who has had dealings with the law in
any capacity or even those who haven’t are probably aware, the law is an ass
(Dickens!) and takes forever to fumble along in clumsy, corrupt, inconvenient
and incompetent manner to a mostly unsatisfactory conclusion. It is probably
why the author decided that ghostly intervention is just about the only thing
that can grease the wheels and smooth the process along somewhat.
Few things
in our troubled world have the ability to inflict trauma the way blood
relatives can. Rockwell attempts to explore this premise vis-à-vis a
protagonist who returns to an ancestral home that is coming apart at the seams
to be with her grandmother who is on her deathbed and mother, a raging
alcoholic. Of course, it is not the property alone that is crumbling, and death
brings in its wake, pain and long – buried familial angst which refuse to
resolve themselves even with the help of perfectly competent psychiatrists and
friendly ghosts. In fact, there is a psychiatrist in the picture, and he is
painfully aware of his inability to help with mental unravelling of a certain
nature, realizing that there is little to be done except go with the flow and
play along even if it means feeding the most delulu notions.
“He lacks
facility with descriptive language” a character says of another but that is not
an issue for the author. The narrative is imbued with a certain fluidity and
otherworldly character that makes it easy enough for the reader to engage with
this dreamlike landscape and its assortment of quirky characters who like the
ghosts are bloodless. Alice herself is a waif who wafts across situations and
handles most obstacles or difficulties by flat out refusing to handle or even
acknowledge any type of unpleasantness. Heck, she won’t even read the
newspapers because they carry reports about non – existent weapons of mass
destruction to justify a war and other unpalatable evidence of harsh reality.
Instead, she gets by like a fragment of a dream fortified by regular intakes of
tea with cream, sugar and shortbread cookies.
The book
touches on issues like aphasia, bigamy, being gay when it was not acceptable,
and even “neocolonial accumulation of wealth from decolonized places” but like
its heroine is a little too refined and therefore reluctant to dig into
anything that is not without grace or charm which means it is content to coast,
carefully avoiding complexity, sharp edges and dirt. At the conclusion, love
and blood ties win out over festering resentment. Which makes sense. In a dream
populated by ghosts.
This review was originally published in TNIE Magazine
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