Review: The Word Ghost by Christine Paice

First of all, a big shout out to the Reading Room and publishers Allen and Unwin for my free review copy. Thanks!

The Word Ghost is, without fail, a real treat. This eccentric tale introduces us to the equally eccentric (but utterly likeable,) Rebecca Abraham Budde, the daughter of a Church of England minister who is enjoying a most idyllic adolescence in a small town in England in 1973. Rebecca, who would rather be known as Abraham, is fifteen years old, and rejects politics, biscuits and bombs. She accepts Walnut Whips, David Bowie, Deep Purple and Dave. Dave, of course, being an attractive teenage boy that she sees every day at the bus stop and has never spoken to, but knows that he is 'the one.' Luck is in store when it turns out that Dave is equally attracted to her. Their romance is short lived, however, after a small mishap when Dave's mum arrives home early. (Cough, cough.) Rebecca and her sisters soon find themselves being packed up and moved to an even smaller village, where their father has taken up a Parrish. Rebecca resolves to hate it there.

And then she encounters a ghost. Algernon Keats is not only the cousin of the famous poet, John Keats, but he is living in Rebecca's bedroom, where he happily writes poetry, much to the amusement of the literature loving Rebecca. And then there is Algernon's sister who lives in the house across the street. His sister went insane after being rejected by a complete cad and wants revenge, despite the fact that George March has now been well and truly dead for many years and his distant descendent, brooding artist Alex, is now living inside the house part time. Quite a few amusing love triangles abound within the narrative, with the poetry, ghosts and humour making some very interesting contrasts against the icky themes of adolescence and betrayal, with 1970s England as a backdrop. Algernon was a character I loved, Dave was a pretty accurate portrayal of an ordinary, horny teenage boy and Alex was an absolute bastard, though his character rings very true. 

I highly recommend this one for fans of English Literature or anyone who just wants to sit back and immerse themselves in something a little bit different.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more