Fiction: Fantasy and the fantastical often feature, strange things happen and lives change, writes Eileen Battersby
Some houses have a story to tell, others have several. The old house at the heart of this book, more thematic collection, than novel, can, in spite of the many sorrows it has witnessed, at least claim to have been built by an act of abiding love. As for the blackbird, that is also part of the history and true to the many ghosts, as well as the emotions.
Alice Hoffman writes about life, love and the unexpected. Her style is best described as a graceful Yankee magic realism, light but never soft. Fantasy and the fantastical have often featured, strange things do happen and lives change, often for the better, yet she is no sentimentalist and remains a kindred spirit of the great Anne Tyler. Hoffman is, however, more mystical, yet her magic is invariably sufficiently realist for her work to be as profound as it is magical.
Redeeming love is her major theme, but she looks beyond passion to other, more difficult types of love. Hoffman is a romantic who writes engaging, if tough romances. Blackbird House is her 17th work of fiction, there have also been five books specifically written for children. As with the best books, they are not defined by specific age audiences.
Another of the strengths of her work is the sense of history and of physical place. The Massachusetts area where she lives and sets much of her work retains a quality of historical layers evident within the present day US life she describes so well. Blackbird House is characteristically Hoffman, but it is also darker, sadder. It is a wise book about realisations. Many of the characters suffer loss, but unlike most of her books to date, her customary healing forces are not as actively present. Too much happens to lives that have gone beyond recovery, and sometimes survival is all that remains.
Of the 12 narrative sequences, the strongest is the opening story, 'The Edge of the World'. This is the story that begins the history. A man so adores his wife he wants to create the perfect home for her. "John Hadley felt a deep love for his wife, Coral, more so than anyone might guess. He was still tongue-tied in her presence, and he had the foolish notion that he could give her something no other man could." Those two sentences reveal exactly how tough and wise a magician Hoffman is. She is insightful, but never irritatingly knowing. A man's hands are stained red by years of cranberry picking; another man wears a necklace of teeth which once belonged to the fish who ate his leg. Women mourn, regret, remember and take flight.
The depth of Hadley's love is soon apparent. He is a Cornish fisherman, now living in New England, and prepared to give up the sea to work the land. By becoming a farmer he and his two sons will live safer lives, it will be better for the family. His older son Vincent is the one who has helped build the house, the younger boy, Isaac, has been too busy playing with his pet blackbird. Still, the boy is only 10 years old. There is to be one last fishing trip and Hadley wants both sons to accompany him. They do, with tragic consequences. "So many men were taken in the May gale that the Methodist church on Man Street could not hold the relatives of the lost all on one day."
The story establishes the mood and tone for the entire book. The blackbird is a constant, a spirit, witness, another ghost. The house, more a cottage, is central both as a home to members of the community over the various generations and later a seasonal residence. It is significant that even when occupied as a holiday home, Blackbird House is a type of refuge. But it is also viewed with suspicion, as the haunt of ghosts. Running parallel to the story of the house is the continuity of generations of families and townsfolk all interconnected by the odd ways in which life and the history of a place develop.
It is a book of surprises; random observations and revelations such as "Witches take their names from places, for places are what give them their strength. The place need not be beautiful, or habitable, or even green. Sand and salt, so much the better. Scrub pine, plumberry, and brambles, better still. From every bitter thing, after all, something hardy will grow." The passages concerning Ruth, the alleged witch of Blackbird Hill, appear to have strayed from the pages of a European fairy tale - a source always important to Hoffman - and yet they are also emphatically her vision, her particular approach to one woman's battle.
Elsewhere, a narrator opens her account by remarking, "Most people wear black for mourning, but my mother wasn't like other people. When my father died she tinted all our clothes red, from the tree sap we called dragon's blood. She dyed the leather of my shoes, to match her scarlet boots. She made a pie with her favourite red pears, and after she had eaten every crumb, she cried red tears."
We know that that mother is none other than Ruth the witch and that the narrator, her daughter, has been drawn into a world of magic steeped in harsh realities offering only the faintest taste of hope. Here, as happens whenever Hoffman writes in the first person voice, an easy relaxed, conversational tone is used which makes the fantastic appear perfectly normal.
Near the close of the book, we are told, "people buy houses for all sorts of reasons, for shelter, for solace, for love, for investment. Katherine and Sam bought their summer house because they were drowning." Emma, their little girl is seriously ill, and fighting for recovery, their future seems to rest on whatever healing the house can offer. For her mother, the child becomes a wonder "back from the brink, watching fireflies every night as if they were the most marvellous sight in the universe, as if just being alive was more than enough". Years later, that little girl, now divorced and 30, "with no child, and no career to speak of", is given the house by her parents who now live in Florida. She decides to visit it and takes a pal who is a settled wife and motherwith her. The mom bails out, but Emma stays on and meets a young boy. Is he a neighbour? Or is he another ghost from the past? Perhaps the blackbird boy, now some 200 years dead and drowned? Who knows?
It doesn't matter. This is the vividly eloquent world of Alice Hoffman's questing imagination, created by thoughts that take seed and grow into stories you tend to remember.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times