Published in 2015, this novel by Elizabeth Hand is told doco-style, with a series of verbatim first-person accounts from the protagonists, which gradually build to form a picture -- though far from a complete picture -- of the events in question. As such, it lends itself brilliantly to audio-book format, and in my version, a team of narrators does a great job of representing the different characters. It's surprising how much atmosphere can be conveyed in this breezy conversational style.

It's a simple story (and note that the summary in this post contains lots of spoilers). We're in the early 1970s. A folk-rock band called Windhollow Faire is invited by their manager to spend a few weeks at Wylding Hall, an ancient deserted manor in the depths of the Hampshire countryside. He's hoping this time out will help them recover from the tragic death of Arianna, a former band member, and give them space and freedom to create.

It's a strange old place, and it affects different band members in different ways. Some appear unfazed, and just concentrate on their music (and their various substance habits). Others -- particularly the shy, talented, beautiful Julian -- become obsessed with its library, its strange old artefacts, and the woods that surround it. These differences in sensitivity create wildly different perceptions of the place, and of the subsequent events. No-one who goes exploring in Wylding Hall ever seems to find quite the same configuration of rooms and staircases; someone finds a room full of dead birds, which no-one else mentions; the space seems to expand or contract for the different characters. Similarly, when Julian takes Nancy up to the nearby ancient barrow, geography seems to bend to allow views that are rationally impossible.

So, all the way through, we have this build-up of strange events and circumstances, which create an increasing sense of foreboding. Many of the testimonies mention oddly acquired wounds that take a long time to heal. After a long party-session, many of the band members hear an unearthly song, whose source remains unidentifiable. There are warnings from the locals about not venturing into the woods; there is silence from the locals when they're asked about the wren-hunting photographs in the corridor of the pub (The Wren)... You're aware that Julian is becoming sucked further and further into something that the others don't quite understand.

Not that the atmosphere is wholly dark. In many ways it's one of those golden summers that you only have when you're young. They're free; they're creating; they don't have a care in the world. The photos taken in the garden where they do a recording session convey this wonderful, insouciant, live-for-the-moment atmosphere.



But then Julian disappears. As does "the girl". She's the mysterious, ethereal-looking youngster who shows up at the band's pub concert -- and who has been glimpsed, but only by some of the characters, already. Julian was last seen heading to his room with "the girl". But no-one in the village knows (or admits to knowing) who she is. No outraged parent appears. And, most bafflingly, when the amateur photographer who covered the recording session in the garden collects the pictures from the developers, he is taken aback to see in several of them a female figure in white, whom no-one spotted at the time, making a faster-than-light beeline towards Julian.

So, what has happened? Well, it's never really explained. Julian never reappears.

Towards the end of the book, we're told that renovations carried out on Wylding Hall have unearthed a neolithic passage grave. Amid the ancient bones lay a modern watch -- the description of which recalls Julian's (he was fascinated by the nature of time, and always wore an elaborate watch).

And the closing testimony comes from former band member Jonno. He says he saw a couple resembling Julian and the girl eight years ago at a Corfu saint's day procession. Neither has altered, despite the intervening decades. "Julian" looks at Jonno, but shows no signs of recognition, and does not respond to his calls: "He just stared through me like I wasn't even there. And then he was gone."

If you're of an entirely sceptical persuasion, I guess you can put most of the story down to hallucinations produced by the overwrought, drug-fuelled atmosphere, plus -- in Julian's case -- an overly bold spirit of adventure acting on an already destabilized psyche. And the photo? Well, it's not entirely inconceivable that someone could have slipped in and slipped out, while everyone was focusing on something else...

If you're a little more open to the presence of "more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy", then maybe you can speculate about places in the world where the divider that separates the ages is a little thinner than normal, so that elements from past eras can leak into the present. Among these emanations in this case would be the mysterious song, the dead birds that were victims of wren-hunting, and "the girl". And if such phenomena can come in this direction, maybe some super-sensitive souls can go in the other direction...

I don't know. A friend of mine can "see" things others can't (and hear and smell them too). Students used to tell me about ghosts they had seen, or supernatural events they had witnessed. I disbelieve no-one. I just don't know.

Cracking good story, though...



There are themes in Wylding Hall that I'm not at all equipped to expand on, but they poke out ever more alluringly as the novel progresses.

It opens with a poem by Thomas Campion (1567-1620) -- there's a musical version by Margaret Davis here -- which has the air of an incantatory summoning:

Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air,
Thrice sit thou mute in this enchanted chair,
Then thrice three times tie up this true love's knot,
And murmur soft "She will, or she will not."...

Then come, you fairies! dance with me a round;
Melt her hard heart with your melodious sound.

Julian sets this to music -- drawing on the ghostly melody some of them heard -- and sings it at the pub gig. It's at the pub that they all see "the girl". So maybe he has summoned more than he bargained for (or exactly what he longed for).



The references to the wrens were fascinating. One of the characters talks about the folklore, which he had come across while hunting for old songs. As soon as he mentions wren hunt songs, I remembered one from the Isle of Man: "We'll the hunt the wren, says Robin the Bobbin; we'll hunt the wren, says Richard the Robin; we'll hunt the wren, says Jack o' the Land; we'll hunt the wren, says everyone." (You can listen to a rendering of the song -- by the delightfully named Mollag Band -- here, but when I lived on the Island, I never saw either the song or the dance performed.)

There's a ton of folklore surrounding the wren, but from the perspective of Wylding Hall, the interesting thing is the connection between the bird and a fairy-queen-type character. On the Isle of Man, she's Tehi Tegi, the head of a powerful fairy realm, and a great enchantress, easily able to lead men to their doom (old trope...). When the fairies are banished by the higher power wielded by St Maughold, Tehi Tegi escapes the ban by assuming the form of a wren. She's not totally safe, however, because a spell is cast upon her that condemns her to come back as a wren once a year -- at which point she's fair game.

As this blogger very perceptively comments: "A story about a promising young artist who’s supposedly lured away by a fairy queen who shows up in the guise of an attractive young woman is a recipe for misogynist cliches in the hands of the wrong writer, so I appreciated Hand’s sensitive handling of the tradition she’s drawing from." She praises Hand's recognition of the starkly diverging experiences of men and women artistes, and continues: "There was something to Wylding Hall that made me think of this recent piece on the gendering of martyrdom, and how we tell very different stories about promising women or promising men who die young. This is a story that can (and indeed should) be enjoyed as a eerie folklore-inspired fantasy, but I liked that there was another side to it too, and I enjoyed going over the questions it invites us to ask."

Me too.