Recently read: "Wylder's Hand"

[john_amend_all]

Wylder's Hand by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Before reading Wylder's Hand, the only acquaintance I had with it was from the references to it in Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey stories. I'd come away with the impression that it was a supernatural story of some kind. Well, it (probably) isn't. It's more of a Gothic thriller.

The story starts by introducing two branches of the same family: the Brandons, and the Wylders. Thanks to a disputed will, no-one's quite sure which branch owns the family estate, but that's not a problem. The two claimants, Mark Wylder and Dorcas Brandon, will marry, and that will resolve the question of the inheritance once and for all. Never mind that Mark prefers Dorcas's best friend Rachel Lake, and Dorcas would much rather marry Rachel's ne'er-do-well brother Stanley. Marriage is all about sorting out who owns the property, and the preferences of the putatively happy couple don't enter into it. Right?

Then, a few weeks before the wedding, Mark unexpectedly leaves for London, and doesn't return...

The mystery, which drives the rest of the book, is what happened to Mark. Has he been kidnapped? Immured in an asylum? Done away with? If so, why do people keep seeing him around? How is he still managing to write letters to Mr Larkin, the local lawyer? If the letters are forged, who's forging them, and why?

In a detective novel, Larkin would be the detective. He starts out that way here, doing the legwork to establish who saw Mark Wylder last. But it quickly becomes apparent (not least because the narrator keeps pointing it out) that he's not doing it out of any love of justice. If he's collecting information, it's in case he needs it later for blackmail. Or to try and swindle the local vicar out of his inheritance. The question regarding his part of the plot quickly becomes not 'Will he discover the truth?' but 'Will he get away with it?'

I found the primary plot rattled along very nicely; it's certainly more gripping than some of the later detective novels I've encountered, and I didn't work out what had happened to Mark before the final revelation. Even the digressions (Lake decides to run for parliament at one point) tend to end up relevant in the end. Uncle Lorne's prophecies are also very fine (bar some racist language in one); these are the passages that Sayers quotes in her books.

There are some bits that haven't aged so well. Letters written by servants are inevitably chock-full of poor grammar and phonetic spelling. This may be historically accurate, but it makes them jolly hard to read for this 21st-century reader. Likewise the passages where the vicar is talking to his son (aged 4) and both characters use nothing but the sickliest baby-talk.

(Dorcas' nickname reads unfortunately today: "Dorkie". She certainly isn't.)

One aspect that seems odd to my modern-day eyes is the way the narration is handled. The story has a first-person narrator: Charles de Cresseron, a family friend. But in the numerous scenes where de Cresseron isn't personally present, he turns into a fully-omniscient narrator, dipping in and out of the characters' thoughts with the greatest of ease. A couple of times he explains that he's reconstructing the conversation from later interviews with one of the participants, but I'm not sure how careful a scrutiny this would bear.

To a modern-day fan with functioning shipping goggles, it's very easy to read Dorcas and Rachel as more than just friends. It starts with the hugging and kissing you'd expect for a close female friendship in a Victorian novel. But then it gets to Dorcas suggesting they should run away together and live in a cottage in Wales. And then there's a scene where Rachel turns down a proposal of marriage; we're led to believe it's because of her guilty secret, or because she doesn't think of her suitor that way, but it works just as well if you read her as lesbian. Whether Le Fanu intended it this way, I don't know, but since he's best known these days for a lesbian vampire by the name of Carmilla, I don't see why not. As far as I can tell there isn't any Wylder's Hand fanfic at all, but if there was any, it ought to be Dorcas/Rachel. For now, I'll just have to make do with random generators.