Uncle Silas (Paperback)

Silas is a wonderful character; in my opinion he is the equal of other great Gothic characters such as Dracula. His evil is all the more defined because there is always the chance that he is a reformed character. Maud, the heroine of the story, finds him terrifying yet desperately wants to believe in him as her father did. Here Le Fanu is very clever, because we, the readers, are perfectly aware that as Silas is the title character of a Gothic horror he is highly unlikely to be good, but of course Maud does not have our knowledge. Like a modern horror film when we know that the girl should not go down into the basement where the murderer is lurking, we know that Maud should not agree to her late father's wishes and take Silas as her guardian, but if it was happening to us we would probably have done the same. Part of Le Fanu's magic in this novel is that he has Maud constantly in the midst of terrifying paranoid fantasies about the danger she is in but then she snaps to with a burst of apparent common sense, and looks at the situation as normal people would. Unfortunately for her the situation is not a normal one.

The ending is magnificent and well worth waiting for; the fact that the story built up so slowly with such atmosphere makes it all the more powerful. This is a wonderful book.

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'Uncle Silas' is probably the most prominent of his novels. It tells the story of young and naive Maud Ruthyn, whose father's death leaves her under the guardianship of the mysterious uncle of the title. In this respect, the plot is conventional, and the ensuing murder plot to deprive Maud of her inheritance unfolds leisurely and with little of the tense, action-filled plots of contemporary sensation novels.

Instead, le Fanu's brilliance lies not in the complexity of his plot, but in his ability to produce a brooding atmosphere of foreboding and doom that is nothing short of the heightening suspense experienced in 'The Turn of the Screw.' Descriptions are brooding and detailed, stretching conventional settings such as dark woods, locked rooms and lonely churchyards to eerie proportions. Overlaid upon these environments is the continual gloom of secret's untold and the strange influence of religious sectarianism which haunts the family.

Adding colour to these monochrome backdrops are the vividly different, yet equally foreboding, characters that populate the novel. Uncle Silas figures dominantly as the frail and sickly, yet unquestionably evil and devious, opium-addicted menace who drives the machinations of the plot. His tool in his schemes is the grotesque Madame de la Rougierre, who figures as Maud's governess, and who's unsuppressed hatred for the child provides a constant source of fear and anxiety for the orphan while she attempts to uncover the secret that the Frenchwoman suppresses.

Although a classic Gothic novel in appearance, the tale isn't without its light moments, and it is this juxtaposition of moods that makes the overall effect so pronounced. The main characters flit in and out of the spotlight, trading places with a variety of other smaller characters whose intentions and affiliations both Maud and the reader are made to puzzle over in an ever heightening spiral of danger and deceit. This is an excellent novel, one which portrays another side of the dark Victorian imagination, and does so with unsettling authenticity.

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