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The Thirteenth Tale: Diane Setterfield
Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale. New York: Atria Books, 2006. 406 pp.
The Thirteenth Tale is a marvel of a first novel for Diane Setterfield. Her protagonist/narrator, Margaret Lea, is a biographer and bibliophile who reads classics with the caress of a lover, while turning her nose up at popular literature.
Enter: the most popular novelist of the day, who inexplicably chooses our protagonist to write her true story the details of which she has been carefully concealing for some fifty years.
To even consider the job, Margaret Lea must immerse herself in Vida Winters books and life. What she finds is an enchanting literary world and a strange and compelling personal story that leads her through locked doors and twisted corridors to surprising and tragic climaxes for both Vidas story and Margarets own. Of Vida Winters books, she wrote: Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me (p.32).
The Thirteenth Tale is a modern gothic mystery with just the right amount of suspense, doomed relationships, hopeful romance, and just plain superb writing to inspire hope for a popular revival of the gothic mystery genre.
As narrator, Margaret Lea grabs a sympathetic ear in the first few pages as she describes her own romance with reading, and she maintains that close identification throughout the novel. She tells a story of being so engrossed in a book when she was a child, that she fell off the garden wall on which she was sitting and injured herself badly, learning what all readers eventually learn that reading can be dangerous (p.4).
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? the narrator asks us on page 289. And we are not only familiar with the feeling, but we know we will soon be experiencing it anew, after reluctantly shelving The Thirteenth Tale. Like a cut, the membrane heals slowly and not without leaving a scar.
It is an altogether amazing novel and, I hope, the first of many by Diane Setterfield. |
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| Deanna Northrup conducts Creative Writing Workshops and will soon be teaching English Composition at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. In addition to book reviews, she writes short stories and literary essays and is at work on her second novel. |
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Date of Publication: 25 Feb 2008 |
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