A.N. Wilson: A Jealous Ghost

American student Sallie Declan, an alarmingly immature 27-year-old, is living alone in a bedsit in Hackney, London, trying to write her doctoral thesis on the subject of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw: Metanym and Anonym.

Her professor's comment that neither metanym nor anonym appears in his dictionary angers Sallie. Why does he insist on realist frames of reference when she, who has been reading Turn — as she calls it — over and over for years, is so attuned to the deeper psychic stuff in James' ghost story classic?

For those who haven't read James' claustrophobic novella, the plot features a young governess sent to care for Flora and Miles, two beautiful but strange children in a remote estate in England, where she discovers them being corrupted by two evil ghosts, including her predecessor. It has been made into a movie many times, and is the basis for Britten's 1954 opera.

Sallie, unsurprisingly, is depressed. Clinically depressed, perhaps. The bedsit is awful, London seems dangerous, she has no money and she's getting nowhere with the thesis. Why not, suggests an acquaintance — to say "friend" would be an exaggeration — get out of London for a while and earn some money as a ... nanny. That is, the 21st century version of a governess.

Although Sallie is initially insulted by the idea, she is astounded to discover how much nannies get paid. So off she sails — wearing her off-white fleece top with motif of teddy bears — for an interview with Charles Masters, head of the remote country house who urgently needs a nanny.

And she immediately falls in love with him. It's perfectly obvious he is interviewing her for the position of wife, and future mother to his two children, Frances and Michael. But there's no time for wooing. Charles has to fly to Hong Kong for business, so he rushes through the business of getting a reference for Sallie.

He should not have. Sallie has babysat before, back in the States, and the results, when the little boy she was bathing told her that her bum was big, were ugly, to say the least. But that was four years ago. Ages, really.

When Sallie moves in, only the little girl Frances is there, as Michael is still at boarding school, about to come home for the holidays. Capable local woman Gloria comes in during the day to cook but there's something about Gloria that Sallie just can't stand. Flora, no, Frances, is a bit standoffish too, and things go right downhill when Miles, she means Michael, comes home.

Michael knows exactly how to push Sallie's buttons. The screw is turning. In-between trying to care for the children, and make them like her, read Turn and obsess about darling Charles, Sallie is also starting to become aware of an evil presence in the house. Could it be Charles' wife, the dead wife? And why are the children behaving badly?

The prolific Wilson signals where he is going with this narrative almost right from the start, but that doesn't stop the pages flying as you race towards the climax of Sallie's battle with the forces of evil. The ending, when it comes, is a shock yet typical of Sallie's short-fused way of handling life thus far. For the reader, a really entertaining, scary and at times highly amusing trot — rather like Sallie's awful day out riding with the children — into the abyss of violent paranoid insanity. Terrible and terrific.

* Hutchinson, $45 (Hardback)