Those Pesky Twins

I read her 'Time Traveller's Wife' with complete absorption, and it was the same with this. I like her rather pent-up and self-concerned characters. It feels like they could all be pretty hysterical and mad - if they could only be bothered. The word languor pops into my head. They're busy enough, all these people of hers. They're zipping about London and through Highgate Cemetary, having spooky and complicated lives... but everything moves so languidly, so carefully for the first 350 pages of this new book of Niffenegger's.

I love all the dripping trees and gravestones and the researchy bits about the graveyard. The whole book's steeped in a kind of subacqueous gloom and we drift from room to room of the shared house at the centre of the book. The man beset by OCDs, wrapping everything in bubble wrap and fretting over his cryptic crosswords. The younger fella and his endless research into the dead. And those dreadful twins. I think they'd irritate me in real life, as would their ghastly mother and aunty. I wish the body swapping and Gothic stuff had started much earlier. It's like being inside of of those shove-ha'penny machines in an amusement arcade... waiting for the huge cache of pennies to drop...

I like the ghost hovering about. I like the technicalities of being a ghost and how they're dealt with. I loved the scene with the snagging of the kitten's soul.

It's Emo Goth. Maybe that's why it feels a bit precious and coy? The girls loll about in the fancy flat they've inherited, reading ghost stories by Henry James et al. I think I was irked by the fact that no one in the book actually has to work or to worry about money. Only the daft old fella in the upstairs, fretting over his compulsions - he does his crosswords and emails them to the Guardian. I'd rather see the Gothic and the spooky stuff happening to people who are in the midst of life, and who are getting on with more ordinary, everyday things. It's as if, in order to write what feels like an authentically English literary novel, Niffenegger has to import some of the snobbery and poshery that seems to go with most English literary fiction.

But I still liked being inside this story. It's a silly one in lots of ways. I don't buy the twist that I'd been warned about on Twitter by various Twitterers. I saw it coming from miles away - and it depends entirely on one character being quite different, actually, to what we had been led to expect. And the plot revelations about her character only added to my feeling that she was being bent out of shape in order to make a punchier climax.

So I'm still a bit torn about it all. It's a bit like having a good old mope and a sulk about, this book. And I guess that's what it's really about, isn't it - at heart? It's all about the chance to become a teenager again - literally. And that's precisely what it felt like.