Skeletons in closets all over haunted hall

Magpie Hall by Rachel King. Photo / Supplied

Rachael King clearly didn't exhaust her fascination for the queer Victorian penchant for "collecting" with her award-winning and much-admired debut novel, The Sound of Butterflies.

In her second, Magpie Hall, she mines it more deeply still: three of her principal characters are dedicated taxidermists, another is a collector of natural and medical "curiosities" and three are collectors of tattoos.

Rosemary Summers has returned to occupy the hoary Canterbury house that belonged to her grandfather until his recent demise. She figures it will be a nice, quiet spot to make progress on her thesis (subject: depictions of romantic love in the Gothic novel), and a convenient refuge from her married supervisor, with whom she's been having an ill-advised affair. She's also aware it's likely to be her last chance to commune with the house and its ghosts, as her grandfather's will has excluded her from the decision over its fate.

The rest of the family have decreed that the ancestral farm will be subdivided and sold and the mansion will be modernised and turned into a guest-house. Rosemary is a taxidermist, like her grandfather (who has left her his collection), and her great-great- grandfather, the Summers' patriarch, Henry. She knows little about Henry apart from the fact that they shared this faintly necrophiliac interest and that he lost his young first wife, officially to a swollen river, although possibly - if the rumours are true - to murder.

But her grandfather has left a letter giving further details, including the information that Henry was tattooed, just like her, and this is food for thought as she mooches about in the chill, dusty interiors of Magpie Hall. Rosemary's wish for peace and quiet is soon derailed. It seems there are skeletons in closets all over the house, both literally and figuratively, and truth, as they say, will out.

The house is alive with anguished memories, and there's the distinct possibility that she's being stalked by a farmhand, too. When she hears a furtive noise coming from the room at the top of the Gothic turret and decides to investigate, she beholds an apparition that forces her to confront the past. The status of the narrative is difficult to determine: what, after all, is real and what is imagined? It's hard to set aside the knowledge that Rosemary is an aficionado of the Gothic novel as floorboards creak, branches tap insistently on windows and the rustling black wings of magpies cast shadows. It's not until the very end that it all gets untangled.

King is a hugely talented writer. Her prose is effortless, whether she is writing description or dialogue, in the English of the 21st or the 19th century - there's neither fuss nor frills, but absolute conviction. As with The Sound of Butterflies, the narrative is underpinned with sound research without being overwhelmed with detail for the sake of it. She manages to evoke the atmosphere of the Gothic novel while keeping the narrative contemporary.

The master image in the novel - that of that quintessential collector and antipodean bird of ill omen, the magpie - perches in the background and provides a harsh commentary on the mores of the Victorians, whose shoot 'n' stuff philosophy was responsible for far more of present-day New Zealand's woes than simply the extinction of the huia.

You get the sense that King hasn't fully extended herself in the writing of Magpie Hall. But that only leaves you eager to see what happens when she gives it everything.

Magpie Hall by Rachael King (Vintage $36.99)
Reviewed by John McCrystal

- John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.