Book review: The Small Hand, by Susan Hill

The power of the literal and the physical is essential to the ghost story; a surprising assertion to make, perhaps, given its supernatural substance. But to engage with metaphor is not why we read the ghost story, as Hill's publicists understand when they describe her novel as "the chilling tale of a man in the grip of a haunting".

For bookseller Adam Snow is indeed in the grip of a haunting: a small, unseen, ghostly child has gripped his hand as he stands outside a derelict Edwardian house. The physical nature of such ethereal encounters terrify us: think of Cathy Earnshaw's ghost in Wuthering Heights, not just tapping at the window pane, but having her ghostly hand dragged across broken glass until it bleeds.

The author of one of the most successful ghost stories - her play, The Woman in Black has been running in London's West End for over 20 years - Susan Hill knows exactly how to conjure fear and how to sustain it. Snow lives alone: a strange, bookish man who seems to have stepped out of a story set at least 50 years before, he has an old-fashioned sense of propriety, and so his trespass on the land where the White House sits, isolated in the countryside and slowly being suffocated by its neglected gardens, is uncharacteristic of him. But he is drawn to investigate nonetheless, and so he lifts the latch and steps closer to the front door. That's when he feels "a small hand creep into my right one," and the mystery begins.

Hill maintains the olde-worlde atmosphere with Snow's aristocratic clients, while contrasting it with his jet-setting to New York and Rome, chasing up valuable first editions for his wealthy customers. When one asks for a Shakespeare First Folio, Snow's contacts lead him to an isolated monastery in the French mountains. En route, he almost crashes his car when a boy darts across the road during a storm, but when Snow stops to look for him, there is no trace of him. At the monastery, he faints with exhaustion, and is only gradually restored by the care of the monks. Nevertheless, during his stay there he is drawn to a deep pool of water and longs to drown himself in it: the small hand gripping his and pulling him along has, quite suddenly, turned malevolent.

Woven in with these frightening experiences are Snow's brother Hugh, who had a breakdown when much younger, and who is reluctant to discuss his brother's new troubles, as well as aristocratic Alice Merriman, who sends information about the mysterious White House. In its once- beautiful garden, its owner, Denisa Parsons, had erected a statue to her grandson, James, after he drowned in the garden pond as a child. This information is provided early in the tale: clearly the small hand belongs to the drowned boy.

But our fear, and Snow's, depends on credulity. Hill's explanation for her hero's haunting only convinces if Snow's state of mind convinces, too. Dreams and ghosts have hinted at repression since long before Freud's time: the gothic was the expression of unspoken desires. But in today's climate, when nothing is taboo and everything is open, what value does the gothic or the ghostly have for us now?

Hill's short novel plays with our developed need for reassuringly down-to-earth explanations for the seemingly inexplicable, and our primal need to be spooked by what we cannot understand. Ever since Henry James made us wonder if ghosts and madness were two sides of the same coin in The Turn of the Screw, the ghost story has toyed with the sanity of its narrators, made us wonder if what he or she is telling us is true.

But Adam Snow is not an unreliable narrator: we do not witness him lying to other characters or to himself. Part of the fear she conjures up, then, is a sense that this could happen to anyone.

It's a good trick to play because, of course, Adam Snow is an extraordinary man, and with an extraordinary history; he just doesn't know that yet. The ghost story is possibly the end point of the novel form, if we think of the novel as an expression of the individual. It is all about the individual and individual consciousness, taken to its most extreme. Hill's superbly crafted tale doesn't belong to a confessional age, but it does belong to an age where we are all striving for our own identity. Where we all, secretly, long for a ghost to reach out and grip us, make us real.