The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield

It's been a month or so since I finished the last of the eight-subject bar exams spread throughout the first four Sundays of September and since then I've read fourteen books (technically speaking one of them is a graphic novel and the other one is a reread). This is the latest book I read which I included in my original list for the Readers Imbibing Peril II Autumn Reading Challenge. I bought this book almost a year ago, December 11, 2006 in fact, a few days off my Davao trip. It was the first time I saw it in the bookstore, just a few months after reading good things about it from Mental Multivitamin last year as well.

As my seventh novel for the challenge, I had high hopes that I'd enjoy this work. I was only too glad not to have been disappointed.

Three things that made me love the book:

First, this is a tale of a writer as much as a tale of a reader engrossed in a book, in a life far removed from one's own and yet seemingly familiar.

Second, this is a tale about ghosts, the ones that haunt and intrude into our thoughts awaiting recognition and the ones that we created ourselves from mistakes or sins of the past which we allowed to fester and thereafter allowed to affect us more than the imagined ones.

Lastly, this is a tale about secrets and revelations; of holding onto them or letting go, of both its liberating and diminishing power once shared.

The book is Setterfield's first novel. I hope she writes again. She has a keen eye to detail, goodness! And I don't mean just the description that somehow takes you to the ruins of Angelfield or its lovely gardens then. It made me feel that not a word nor sentence is out of place. In a story such as this, the details count. Because later on you'll find yourself turning back the pages, rereading the same sentences you knew you've read before but failed to take into account as the story slowly unfolds to take you in. At least that's what it did to me, it took me in and I totally forgot myself. I dismissed my own thoughts as to where it was heading and like a dancer in the arms of an instructor allowed myself to be led away.

This is not just the story of Vida Winter and Margaret Lea although there is a certain satisfaction, disbelief and even wonder upon reaching the conclusion to both their stories. To me it's also the fascination involved in a writer's life, of where they get their ideas, their stories. Not all authors share the lifestory of Vida Winter as detailed in this book. She is fictional after all. But the fascination itself is real.

I think it's also an invitation to readers to write or to share stories with this:

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

And more particularly so when Vida tells Margaret this:

You are at liberty to say nothing, if that is what you want. But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

Because in the end each and everyone of us has a story to tell.