Book name- ALICE SEES GHOSTS
Author- Daisy Rockwell
Published by- Bloomsbury, Price- Rs 699
The title, Alice Sees Ghosts, the reader would realise in the course of turning the pages, is suggestive of a comparatively minor plot point placed next to a broader, more compelling family saga. A granddaughter, upon being bequeathed a ruinous ancestral home in New England by her dead grandmother, takes on the task of uncovering buried secrets of her family's past to mend broken bonds. In the course of this tryst, Alice does see ghosts. But unlike Macbeth's Banquo or Beloved's eponymous ghost, the spectral presence in Rockwell's story is not a manifestation of a troubled conscience but a benevolent apparition — that of Alice’s dead grandfather, Charles, who provides Alice with clues to help her piece together the information that eventually leads her to discover a long-lost cousin and the identity of her real grandfather.
In the beginning, we come across Alice recovering from aphasia — a neurological condition that impairs communicative skills — with the help of Ronit, her psychiatrist. Even though facets of the years of mental abuse that Alice suffered owing to her raging alcoholic mother, Clare, and her incessant reading of fairy tales seem to provide an explanation for Alice's "problem", what is not revealed is the reason that made Alice lose her linguistic ability in the past or why she is having "peculiar dreams" at present. Alice had to bring herself up in her dysfunctional maternal grandmother's home and simultaneously be a mother to Clare. While she experiences her "hauntings" in a matter-of-fact way, Ronit, her psychiatrist and lover, decides to assist her by setting aside his scientific beliefs.
The omniscient but unidentified narrator follows Alice and Ronit as they embark on a journey to India to locate Charles's second family and provide them with an annuity. The daunting prospect of informing the characters they meet about the fact that her source of information is a spirit becomes, at times, a comical thread. Alice finds unlikely sympathisers for her sightings in Ronit's well-educated Bengali parents and Charles's second wife. The meticulous description of settings blends with the keen plumbing of the characters' psychological depths to propel the narrative forward, providing not just a reliable perspective of the events but also plausibility to Alice's fantastical experiences. The utilitarian aspect of her hallucinations is discernible from the fact that she miraculously ceases to have them as loose ends are serendipitously tied up.
Rockwell's family drama thus navigates the liminality between the real and the unreal as a magical redressal for past injustices.