Shade: A Novel

By Neil Jordan

The Oscar-winning filmmaker Neil Jordan returns to fiction with a haunting, highly praised novel, his first in ten years. Narrated by the ghost of Nina Hardy, an actress who is murdered in the opening scene of the book, Shade tells the story of two pairs of siblings growing up in Ireland in the first half of the century. Through a childhood that memory gives the luster of romance and the tragedy that strikes as the children reach adolescence and the two boys leave for the Great War, these unforgettable characters reach the 1950s to play their roles in a murder ultimately revealed as the opposite of the senseless crime it seems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Release date: Aug 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9781596918207

Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter and author based in Dublin. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He is also a former winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Irish PEN Award, and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Jordan's films include Angel, the Academy Award-winning The Crying Game, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy.

Book preview

"A lyrical experiment in point-of-view . . . It’s not surprising that Jordan, writer and director of The Crying Game and Michael Collins^ would have a lot to say about identity and sexuality, acting and observing, and politics. But as this quiet novel steps surely toward its powerful conclusion, it’s also a testament to the simple but profound power of storytelling."—Booklist

Lyrically precise writing . . . The specific detail with which Nina describes her early years . . . and her experience of the movies’ transition from silent films to ‘talkies’ is invariably dramatic and interesting.—Kirkus Reviews

With this fierce, dark and yet luminous novel, Neil Jordan once again demonstrates that he is one of Ireland’s most talented artists.—John Banville

"Compelling, intriguing, precise and poetic, personal and political, at once a human drama and a fascinating metaphysical mystery, Shade courses its way, like the river Boyne that runs through it, steadily, patiently but, thankfully, never predictably—we should expect nothing less from the author of The Crying Game—before reaching its final, heartbreaking denouement. Triumphant. ‘’—Patrick McCabe

"The extraordinary Shade . . . restores Jordan to his Irish roots and, more particularly, to the intricate emotional landscapes of his early work . . . Jordan’s rich, visual prose is perfectly cadenced to this tragedy of misplaced love. Few writers can convey human loneliness in quite such an achingly spare, unsentimental form.’’—Independent

{Jordan] recreates the drained landscape with the vivid care of a Dutch painting, and infuses it with longing . . . Wonderfully elegiac . . . The book is powerfully visual.—Guardian

Praise for Shade

‘Jordan’s lavish, meticulous portrayals of the brackish waters in Ireland, the crackle of shells in the riverbed underfoot, the bobbing heads of the dead in battle, help weave fiction and history seamlessly together . . . Jordan’s writing . . . easily communicates the nuances that shape the friends’ relationships, as well as the enthralling story that drives the reader to find out exactly why Nina was murdered."—San Francisco Chronicle

The ways in which the children’s maturing love for each other plays out are unpredictable—sometimes staggering—and the final revelations . . . will bring a gasp of shock or admiration from even the most worldly reader.—Los Angeles Times

"Jordan, who loves tricks and surprise endings, rises to his own challenge of keeping us in suspense even though we already know how the story is going to end."—New York Times Book Review

A feverish gothic tale . . . graceful . . . and deeply haunting.—Bookforum

Jordan has endowed his shade with a rhythmically mesmerizing voice—eerie, yet deeply compassionate . . . Jordan’s evocation of childhood and youth in early 20th-century Ireland is wondrous to behold. His battle scenes are harrowing. The music of his prose is lush but not overwrought, attuned to nuances of emotion and landscape.—Newsday

A haunting, compelling tale of friendship and loss . . . The layers of past and present are peeled away, tantalizing us with an ever-widening picture.

—St. Paul Pioneer Press

{An} astounding novel that captures the exquisite pleasure and pain of childhood friendships.—East Bay Express

"Elegantly sober narration from beyond the grave distinguishes this ghost story from novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan . . . Daring and well-crafted."—Publishers Weekly

SHADE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Night in Tunisia

The Past

The Dream of a Beast

The Crying Game (screenplay)

Sunrise with Sea Monster

SHADE

A NOVEL

NEIL JORDAN

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright © 2004 by Neil Jordan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the

publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical

articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London

Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made

from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform

to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Jordan, Neil, 1951-

Shade : a novel / Neil Jordan

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-820-7

1. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Fiction. 2. Murder victims’ families—Fiction.

3. Murder victims—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Ireland—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6060.O6255S53 2004

823’.914—dc22

2004009157

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004

This paperback edition published in 2005

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

Dear shadows, now you know it all

W. B. Yeats

Table of Contents

I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

II

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

III

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

IV

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

V

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Acknowledgments

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

I

1

I KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I died. It was twenty past three on the fourteenth of January of the year nineteen fifty, an afternoon of bright unseasonable sunlight with a whipping wind that scurried the white clouds through the blue sky above me and gave the Irish sea beyond more than its normal share of white horses.

Even the river had its complement of white. It was a rare wind, I knew from my childhood by that river, that would mould the waves into runnels of white foam, but it was a rare wind that day. I had studied those black waters as a child, sat on the bank of its smaller tributary with the hem of my yellow skirt between my chin and knees, because waves and all of their motions held a strange fascination for me. From the inkily silver reflecting surface, untouched by air, to the parabolas of ripples that would appear and then vanish, to the regular lapping of small pyramids of water, to the sculpted crests with their flecks of white. It was those the river had that day, and more. A good force five, a sailor would say. And George, who killed me, had been a sailor in his time.

George killed me with his gardening shears, the ones with which he cut the overgrown ivy on the house and trimmed the expanse of lawn, hedge and garden that descended towards the mudflats and tributaries of the Boyne river. He had large hands, gardener’s hands, scarred in many places by the blades he wielded: shears, secateurs, lawnmower and scythe. He had one finger missing and a face marked with the memory of fires long ago. If one could have chosen one’s killer, needless to say one would not have chosen George. One would have chosen softer hands, or more efficient ones, the kind of hands that you see in films or read about in books. Definitely five-fingered hands, that could smother easily, break a neck in one gesture. But life, as we all know, rarely imitates fiction, nor does it move with the strange efficiency of the films I once acted in. And if George’s life had prepared him for anything, it was to deliver me a death that was, like the house, Georgian.

He held the shears to my neck in the glasshouse, and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on my throat. He mistook my loss of consciousness for death, then brought the world back to me while he dragged me through the roses, the world with its scudding clouds above. He watched the last of my blood flow into the muddy channel and augmented it with tears of his own. He decided against a watery grave and carried me like a lifesize doll to the septic tank, then realised I was still living while lowering me in. He spent one last energetic minute severing the head from the body he had known, in one way or another, since his early childhood. And so my last sight was not of sky, sea or river, but of his blood-spattered watch on his thick wrist, and the time on that watch read twenty past three.

Time ended for me then, but nothing else did. I can’t explain that fact, merely marvel at the narrative that unravels, the most impossible and yet the commonest in the books I read in that house as a child. The narrator for whom past, present and to some extent the future are the same, who flips between them with inhuman ease. My Pip is my Estella and both are my Joe Gargery, and what Joe says to Pip I would say to George. What larks, Pip.

So there I am, aged seven, rocking on the wooden swing beneath the chestnut tree at the bottom of the sloping field that curved below the grass-covered manhole. There are Gregory and George, behind me or beneath me. I’m worried about whether they can see my knickers, then oddly not worried at all, staring at the tall, sad woman who is staring back at me, dressed in a grey fur coat, black beret and a pair of Wellington boots. This woman is me, and they are my gardening clothes. I have an attitude of elegance, despite the tufted coat, I am smiling, despite the air of angular sadness, and I am my own ghost. I am glad I didn’t know that then, glad the girl that I was could luxuriate in this comforting presence, this familiar, without knowing how familiar it actually was.

But I knew, when he finally deposited my remains in that septic sphere, replacing the covering of rusted metal, smoothing the grass above it with his bloodied nine fingers. I knew it all then.

You saw me play Rosalind in the school hall, George, I would have said if I could. But of course I couldn’t and his name twisted into anagrams in whatever consciousness I had. George, Eorgeg, Egg Roe, Ogre, Gregory. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. But men have killed for love, endlessly.

And when he dumped me into my excremental grave it was perhaps in the dim hope that the body he’d longed for would seep one day where all the old effluent seeped, into the river and thence to the sea. And maybe it was an act of flawed, bruised affection, that attempt to send me into the mouth of the river I had loved, and into the final embrace of that sea, which had seemed to all of us, since childhood, infinite.

To have carried me into that sea, to have lowered me into the scarfed waters of that river, might have been love, a love at least that Rosalind could have mused upon. But corpses don’t seep like effluent. George, in fact, left me undiscovered in that undiscovered country, never to reach that sea or glimpse that shore beyond which is no other shore. He would be arrested, since the trail of blood and tissue would be as messy as it could have been. But forensics wouldn’t exhume my body, he had seen to that. The plot beside my parents’ grave in Baltray churchyard would remain unopened. And I would remain in a circle of old effluent within the sphere of a septic tank.

I look at myself, with eyes as preternaturally quiet as the eyes with which George looked at me that afternoon of scudding clouds, wind and murder. I could fear for myself, but fear will be singularly useless.. The girl that I was will follow her course and nothing I, her familiar, could do would prevent it. But there’s a comfort in her gaze and I’m trying to comprehend it. She is swinging, still, over the runnel of the larger river on that swing her father so carefully built her, swinging high, so she can see beyond the waters, beyond the dull green swathe of mud she will one day call Mozambique to where the white caps garnish the sea itself. I turn, to follow her arcing gaze towards the shore beyond which is no other shore, and her face comes level with the back of my head, and I feel the wind of life brush my dead hair into movement and I turn again and find myself looking directly into those wonderful eyes.

I can see myself in those eyes, my own reflection, retreating from me as she swings away, gaining on me as she swings back, and I realise the comfort lies in the fact that I am seen, I am seen and therefore am. I know it with a certainty I only came close to when he hacked the head from my body and was certain that death was coming, sweet easeful death, and the certainty is that I am, I exist, somehow, in those pools of luscious brown, swinging towards me and away, on the swing Dan Turnbull and her father built her, or was it me.

So her narrative begins, as it will end, with a ghost.

2

SHE HAD BEEN born in the house some time before the new century, three years exactly, but her awareness of the sad presence coincided with the new era. Three years old, in or around the year nineteen hundred, and her mother found her in the curve below the large stairwell, talking quietly and intimately to somebody who wasn’t there. The sunlight came through the bubbled glass of the tall convex window, and she sat below it in the darkness, her doll clutched to her tiny chest, talking to nothing in particular.

Nina Hardy, said her mother—for that was her name, Nina, and Elizabeth was the mother’s—whatever are you doing, talking to yourself on the draughty stairs? Come down and have your breakfast.

Can she come too? asked Nina, and when her mother asked who, Nina pointed to the nothing in particular she had been addressing.

Of course she can, said mother, who was a woman wise enough not to question the private world of children, and took Nina’s hand and led her down the stairs to the stone floor of the kitchen, where the flags were cold beneath her bare feet, where the whitewashed limestone arched above the deal table and the range where Mary Dagge prepared her eggs. Now Nina, said Mary Dagge, here’s your egges.

She pronounced eggs with two syllables because she came from the town nearby, Drogheda, where eggs were pronounced egges. And when she placed the cracked plate with its blue castellated pattern and its damp yellow pile of scrambled eggs beside Nina, Nina divided it neatly in two, one for herself and one for her unseen playmate. And over the years to come Mary Dagge would grow accustomed to this division of spoils, to the portions of meals left uneaten on the right-hand side of her plate, to the sugar-coated sweets carefully shared with nobody in particular and to the conversations with shadows in isolated corners of the draughty house. For Nina was an imaginative child, her large brown eyes were pools into which one could sink, gladly, and the house was large, too large for an only child like her.

The house was on a bend of the estuary of the river Boyne, close to where it entered the sea in a small delta of mudflats. There were unkempt gardens leading to the river’s tributary, over which a chestnut tree inclined, and her father attached two ropes to its sturdiest overhanging branch which he tied in turn to a small wooden swing. So Nina could swing, when the weather permitted, over the coal-black waters and glimpse the white caps of the waves on the ocean beyond, providing, that is, she swung high enough. There was a glasshouse to one side and a vegetable garden, the walls of which continued, along the roadside, to the banks of the river itself.

To be present at the beginning of a new century pleased her father, she could tell that instinctively, though she might not have known what the word century meant. But when she saw him supervise the riveting of the rope to the wooden chair of the swing, the rope spliced neatly round the piece of metal shaped like a tear-drop, the screw’s thread beneath it fitting neatly into the precut hole in the wood, she knew it was part of a process that was exact and industrial, it was to do with metal and measurement and that this swing would be a superior swing to those built long ago. And when her father lifted her at last, placed her on the finished swing, and Dan Turnbull, who had screwed the final bolts, pushed her from behind, it felt odd to be swinging on a seat so new and to be staring over the water, at the face of the sad and lovely presence who was part of a story she would never know, that must have happened long ago.

Her father was old too, but so much in love with newness that his oldness fitted in, somehow, with every new thing. She could never imagine loving anyone more than her father, except perhaps her secret friend, during her more secret moments, but because she was secret that didn’t count. No, her father was part of the world that declared itself as real and she loved him for it, as much as for his love of all things new.

And when he brought her to the shellfish factory he had built by the mouth of the Boyne river, on a late summer’s day when the salmon were already leaping, to show her the new ice-machine, she loved him most of all. He led her by the hand into the low, stinking interior, pierced by the rays of the summer sun from the windows on one side, where the shellfish workers stood and touched their caps as he passed towards the sound of rhythmic clunking in the back. There were clouds like steam, but it was a cold steam, and the clunking had two causes, that of the engine-belt which rattled as it moved, and that of the great ice-blocks which hit the wooden base with a thump, shattered in clouds of that cold steam and shattered again under the force of the sledgehammers which the shirtless men swung down. When he told her it would keep the shellfish alive and fresh until they reached the cities of England, it was impossible not to share his pleasure, though she was uncertain what this meant.

She was glad, if the truth be known, when he led her out of that hellish interior, but was happy again when he knelt with her by the river and watched its molten immensity flow past and told her once more the story of the river’s birth. How the well at its source blinded anyone who was bold enough to gaze at their reflection. How a girl of surpassing beauty, with flowing locks like her own, came to wash her hair in it. How the waters rose, shocked at her beauty, how she ran to escape them and how they finally overtook her here, at the seashore near Mornington, deprived her of both her sight and her life. Her name was Boinn, so the river was called Boyne, after the name of its first victim.

There were long tendrils of seaweed beneath the water which rippled with the moving tide. And looking down on them, she could well imagine a long bed of hair beneath the shifting river, the young girl of surpassing beauty still beneath it, the waters perpetually washing her ever-growing hair. Looking up, she could see the obelisk of barnacled stone that sprang up where the river met the sea and was called the Lady’s Finger. Beyond it was the ruined hulk of the Maiden’s Tower. When sailors wished to enter the river’s mouth, her father told her, they would shift their boats until the Lady’s Finger was in line with the Maiden’s Tower, then know they were at an angle to strike the bar. What strike the bar meant she had no idea, but a river whose mouth was guarded by the Lady’s Finger and the Maiden’s Tower and whose source was a young girl’s hair seemed without doubt to be a womanly river. And the men who angled their sails through her, who pulled the fish from her in dark wet nets, who dragged the scallops, cockles and mussels from her seaweedy depths were lucky to have a woman of such bounty. She wondered were the drowned girl and her secret companion one and the same. But she decided on reflection that they could not be, since her ghost wore clothes that were of a later time and the clothes were never, ever wet.

~

Shade. Of a bat’s wing, of a sycamore at noon, of an ash in thin moonlight, in the biggest shade of all. Nightshade. Shade of what was. I am that oddest of things, an absence now. A rumour, a shade within a shadow, a remembrance of a memory, my own. A stray dog forages with my Wellington boot, buries it in the potato patch, digs it up again, buries it again.

George sits in his cottage in the grounds after the event and listens to the accounts of afternoon race meets on his radio. There is a distant creak from the ironwrought gate by the house entrance as the postman pushes it open. The faint sound of crunching footsteps, as he wheels his bike down the curving avenue, stuffs a handful of bent brown envelopes through the letterbox which fall on the varnished floor. As the tide turns, the winds drop and the clouds quieten their movement, the white horses subside. A low, endless mackerel sky forms a backdrop to the falling sun. Oystercatchers pick their way along the mudflats of the estuary. A film of ice forms along the edges of the river. The blood on the grass grows white with hoar-frost. The world becomes a painting without me in it.

George rises from the car seat that is his only chair, walks out of his cottage leaving the door ajar, the radio on. He moves between the copse of ash and elder like a ghost himself. He wades across the river in his twine-tied boots, leaving elephantine prints in the mud behind him. The water reaches his neck, almost washes him clean. He makes his way along the other side of the river as the moon rises, picks mussels from the frozen shore, eats them raw. The words in his head are estuary, anglo-saxon, monosyllabic—mulch, shit, loam, earth.

He lies face down in the wet sand and feels the brine seeping through his old tweed jacket with the leather elbow-patches. The casts of lug worms stretch away before his eyes to the rippled sand of the shore where the water laps sluggishly in the moonlight. If he could burrow his way into the sand beneath him, he would. If he could shed his coat, his flannel shirt, his greasy jeans and the orange twine that binds them, his flesh and the tissue that binds it, if he could shed the whole of him and throw it up as wet cast, he would.

He is beyond connective thought, but the words thrum through him. What covers the earth is mulch and decay and he has delivered the living to it. He has partaken in the savage order of things. And George now feels the murmur of renewal inside him. A spider crab crawls between his fingers and edges into a wormhole. A kittiwake squawks and he rises, walks along the Mornington shore and the suck of wet sand beneath his feet changes to the crunch of broken seashell. Scallop, cockle, mussel, periwinkle, every footfall tells him of the necessity of death and how the earth needs its skeletons.

Mornington, Bettystown, Laytown, he covers each strand and wades waist-deep through the mouth of the Nanny river, a large hunched figure dark against the phosphorous glow of the breaking waves. He is on a journey back from reason, to the place he was released, St. Ita’s psychiatric hospital, Portrane.

It is morning when he reaches it. He walks from the shore past the round tower to the lawns with the red-bricked citadel of the asylum in the background. The nurses are arriving in their wrappings of stiff white. Beneath the barred window he once knew he stands covered in brine, sand, silt, any trace of the blood he spilt encrusted beneath it. He seems lost and wants asylum, in the old sense. Dr. Hannon drives by in a black Ford car, stops and says, George, what on earth. And George says, simply, Home.

3

HER MOTHER, UNLIKE her father, seemed unexcited by the onset of the new century. The house was hers, had come to her through her father, Jeremiah Tynan, whose fortune rose steadily from the early days of the Drogheda Steampacket Company and who bought it with the profits gleaned from the first iron paddlesteamer, the Colleen Bawn, on the Drogheda-Liverpool route. He had died before the launching of the Kathleen Mavourneen, the largest steamer built for the Drogheda Steampacket Company, two hundred and sixty feet long, with a beam depth of one hundred and fifty feet and a gross tonnage of nine hundred and ninety-eight. But the fortune remained intact, indeed prospered, until the company was sold and the house passed to his wife and eventually his youngest daughter, by which time it seemed to have been theirs for ever. Baltray House, on the northern banks of the mouth of the Boyne river, with a view of Mornington, across the river, to the south.

His only daughter had been spared the vicissitudes of trade, had been educated at the Siena Convent on the Chord Road, Drogheda, founded by Mother Catherine Plunkett, grand-niece of the martyred St. Oliver, for the education of young Catholic ladies. On her graduation she had travelled to Siena itself in the company of a nun of her mother’s choosing and had there acquired, instead of a taste for the mysticism of St. Catherine of Siena, a taste for the fine arts. In Arezzo she dutifully copied the Piero della Francescas, and later, in Florence, the Raphaels at the Uffizi and the towering marble of Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia.

And there, in front of the David, she met a young Englishman named David Hardy who was tracing, on his rectangular pad, everything about the statue but its marble penis. A conversation was struck up under the watchful eye of the chaperoning nun which was resumed two years later, after a chance meeting in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square under the canvas of Velázquez’ Immaculate Conception, Elizabeth Tynan having travelled to London to further her studies in the fine arts. There were tears streaming down his face and the reason for those tears, when she questioned him gently, moved her deeply. They were caused, he told her, as he dried his cheeks on the handkerchief she had lent him, by his feeling of utter inadequacy in the face of the perfection of the canvas in front of him, a perfection he could never hope to match. In fact the tears, she would learn some eight years later, when the son that had been denied him entered their lives, had quite a different source. But in front of the canvas, the serene beauty of the Virgin’s face seemed a more than adequate explanation, and soon she was crying too. So he

Reviews for Shade

[alera_6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story itself is in many ways lacking. It's hard to enjoy at the beginning, hard to get a grasp for who is speaking. Hard to differentiate between Nina before and Nina after. The writing is lovely. The descriptions are at times heart breaking. It's the outside view of a life, told by the ones who lived it, both during and removed from, and that which will destroy it. It's a doomed path from the beginning and you almost ache to want to change things, even a little. But very true to reality in that one cannot change the past, change the choices that lead them to where they end up. You can only let it happen and hope for the best.

[turtlesleap · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Within the first few pages of this book, Nina Hardy is murdered by her childhood friend, George. The method and circumstances of her death are given in detail. The story goes on to explore Nina's life from childhood on and to examine the nature of her relationship with George, his sister Janie, and her own half-brother. The reveal of George's motive for murdering the woman he had loved throughout his life provides the denouement of the story.Jordan's use of the language is compellilng, poetic and sometimes almost entrancing. The tone of the story is so languid and detached, however, that it is very hard to care about the characters, even as their lives take extraordinary twists and turns and are subject to tragedies which, in another context, would be very affecting. This is one of those books that seems to cry out to be a film, and I realized after I had finished it that much of Jordan's work is in that media.

[srghc8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found the premise of this book very intriguing. However, as I started to read the book I was a little disappointed. The dialogue throughout most of the book is unbelievable, most adults don't talk like that let alone children. I found it hard to identify with the characters, and throughout most of the book just wished the story would end already. About three quarters of the way through the book I found it enjoyable again. Though the story didn't live up to my expectations Jordan's prose t...moreI found the premise of this book very intriguing. However, as I started to read the book I was a little disappointed. The dialogue throughout most of the book is unbelievable, most adults don't talk like that let alone children. I found it hard to identify with the characters, and throughout most of the book just wished the story would end already. About three quarters of the way through the book I found it enjoyable again. Though the story didn't live up to my expectations Jordan's prose though the whole book is beautiful

[juva_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nina Hardy is a 50s movie actress who has returned to her childhood home. Taking pity on a childhood friend, George, who lost his mind after returning from the war, she offers him a position as her gardener. Within the first pages of the book, George murders Nina. The remainder of the book is narrated by Nina's ghost, who begins at her childhood to explain how this tragedy came about.Beautifully written, evocative and haunting.