John Harwood

In ‘Late Works’, the last poem in Black Inc.’s new selection of Gwen Harwood’s poetry, a dying poet, determined to pen her ‘late great’ poems, calls from her hospital bed for paper. The nurse, misunderstanding, brings toilet paper, much to the poet’s chagrin. It is a typical Harwood inversion ...

In The Asylum, the latest dark suspense novel from John Harwood, the author manages to walk a fine line between Gothic romance and contemporary psychological thriller. Or rather, he gambols gleefully along it, delighting his reader with familiar Gothic tropes while deftly interrogating his protagonist’s sense of her own self. There are mirrors here, an insane asylum, and enough startling coincidences to make you think Harwood was actually writing this in late Victorian England, where the novel is set. There are even a dark, brooding hero and a diabolical villain, assuming they are who they appear to be. But at its heart this novel concerns one woman’s struggles with her own identity, one she is only barely aware of herself. That woman’s name is Georgina Ferrars. Or is it?

Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls and floors, scribbled on slates and, occasionally, expressed in garbled song. Tennyson wrote, ‘the veil / is rending and the Voices of the day / Are heard across the Voices of the dark’.

There is a species of Victorian mystery story that is as pure an expression of nineteenth-century rationalism as you are likely to find. A strange event occurs which, at first glance, appears to admit no rational explanation; by the end of the story, it is revealed to have a logical explanation after all. Thus foolish superstition is banished by the pure light of reason. But there is another side to late-Victorian fiction of the unexpected, represented by Henry James’s ghost tale The Turn of the Screw (1898): a darker, slipperier, and far more unsettling narrative in which the supernatural elements are never satisfactorily explained and are charged with menacing psychological overtones.