Possession - Peter James

I had heard of Peter James, obviously.  He is one of the established stars of British crime fiction.  Had I read any?  I'm not sure.  I certainly watched the TV adaptation of his Roy Grace series but didn't much like it.  I am usually a fan of John Simms but in this case he didn't quite hit the mark as I recall.  I remember that his Achilles Heel, his fatal flaw so far as the police force was concerned, was faith in psychics.

Anyway I bought Possession on the off-chance, wondering if perhaps it had been wrongly listed under Horror and Supernatural.  But no, it's a standalone supernatural thriller from 1988, quite early in James's writing career - and, as the title suggests, it's all about possession.

Cambridge student Fabian Hightower has died in a car crash in Europe.  His mother Alex is devastated.  He was her only child.  She is a literary agent in London, her estranged husband David is establishing a vineyard in the countryside.  One of Alex's friends suggest she might want to consult a psychic and eventually Alex finds the dapper Morgan Ford.  He suggests holding a series of 'circles' in Fabian's room, to help his spirit move on.

No surprises that from that point on, things go to hell in the proverbial handcart.

The thing is, James makes a tremendous success of the story.  He clearly has unconventional views about the psychic world.  His medium, Ford, is convincing, the apparitions and apports all too real.  Yet he also knows and presents the arguments against.  David Hightower is a flat-out skeptic, whereas Philip Main, Alex's client, a writer of popular science books, helped his father as a fraudulent psychic but can't entirely dismiss the idea of some sort of basis for an afterlife.  Main and Ford agree on one thing which is key to the plot: These things can sometimes be genetic.

There are secrets and twists good enough for any crime thriller and the denouement is a finale with supernatural bells on.  Even so, James leaves some of the key issues open to interpretation.  No wonder he is such a success.  This is absolutely how these things should be done.  Possession is on a par with Stephen King.

Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I first read this novella when it came out in paperback in 1995.  I liked it then but, re-reading it now and having read much more Latin American literature, I loved it.

The structure is clever.  The prologue, which may or may not be true, tells us that as a young reporter Marquez was sent to report on the exhumation of corpses from the old Clarrisan convent in Cartagena.  While he is there, a tomb in the third niche of the high altar is cracked open and an ocean of red-gold hair spills out.  A skull follows, the skull of a teenage girl.  The inscription tells us that this was once Sierva Maria de Todos Los Angeles.  The remainder of the book is her story.

Back in the late Eighteenth Century Sierva was the only child of an elderly decayed marquis and his crazy bulimic wife.  Sierva has been left to run wild with the slaves.  One day, when she is twelve years old, she is nipped on the ankle by a rabid dog.  Nothing happens but the marquis becomes obsessed with the idea that his daughter is going to go mad and die.  Eventually, after his wife has left him, he places Sierva in the convent where the abbess immediately concludes she is possessed.  The bishop sends his protege Cayetano Delaura to exorcise her.  Instead, he falls in love with the child.

The atmosphere of sweltering decay - the exploration of an alien, debased society imposed on layers and layers of native culture - is spellbinding.  There is a sense of a fairytale, or moral fable, yet it remains of novel of character tested in extremis.  Utterly compelling.