12. Morgan's Castle by Jan Hilliard

Well looks like I've hit the big time.  Those who follow me closely will have spotted Brian Busby's generous offer to send me the latest Ricochet Books release in the comments section of my review of The Three Roads.  Busby has his own excellent blog and is also the editor at Ricochet Books is an imprint of local publisher Véhicule Press and they do great work, finding and re-releasing in lovely paperback (proper paperback size too, none of this trade paperbacks nonsense) a range of Canadian genre novels, mostly excellent crime and pulp fiction from the mid-20th century.  Go check out their catalogue, it's amazing.  Well he very kindly followed up on his offer and sent me an efficient little package containing this lovely paperback reprint of a lost Canadian semi-classic.  It was surprisingly thinner than I had expected and I jumped right in.

I find it difficult to characterize this novel.  As a rule, I don't read introductions or afterwords (and even try to avoid blurbs) of a book until I have finished the book itself.  The idea is to avoid assumptions and just approach it as directly as possible.  I realize that even with those rules, I had several unexamined assumptions in my head and they were wrestling with the text itself in my brain as I read it.  This is particularly the case with the "gothic" novel.  The famous cover conceit of women with great hair fleeing a castle/manor/cabin with one light on has overshadowed the actual genre itself, one that was already problematic to define.  Morgan's Castle is certainly gothic adjacent in its setup, but the tone and unfolding of events are very different, almost like a dark comic social satire of gentile Canadians behaving badly.

The story takes place in rural Ontario in the early 60s and involves a teenage girl, Laura Dean and her widower, artist father. They live in survivable genteel poverty with better off family members not too far away.  Her aunt Amy as well as her adult brothers are all concerned about her future in about the most selfish way possible:  they want to ensure that she is quickly married off so none of them have to deal with the responsibility of supporting her.  They seem awful right from the get-go.  At first I thought it would be a kind of father and daughter against the world set-up, but her father is portrayed just as negatively.  He is a completely self-obsessed, indulgent and shameless dilettante who only seems to care about his daughter's future in how it will impact him (negatively if she leaves him alone but positively if she can marry into money from which he could benefit).  I'm seething against all these people just a few chapters in!  Laura herself is somewhat of a cypher, a sweet and pleasant girl but still very young and inexperienced.  Though the book is mostly from her perspective, the reader never really gets any sense of her character.

Her aunt Amy is very close friends with Charlotte Morgan, who is the matriarch by marriage of Hilltop House, a mansion overlooking the winery that brought her dead husband their wealth.  Charlotte's lone son Robert's wife was recently made a widower himself (by either an accidental or suicidal ingestion of arsenic sprinkled on berries) and she has designs on making Laura his new bride.  So she invites Laura to spend the summer with her at Hilltop House (or Morgan's Castle as the townsfolk call it).  We get this great set-up where the dad also comes, though very much unwelcome, and refuses to leave ostensibly to watch over his daughter but really because he gets luxurious room and board.

This is where my expectations became confounded.  There is no suspense in Morgan's Castle.  Right away, you hate Charlotte and Amy for their conspiring to manipulate this maiden's future.  Laura is sort of isolated the way you might expect in a gothic thriller but she really isn't as there are so many people around all the time.  It also becomes pretty obvious that the various deaths around Hilltop House could only be the responsibility of one person and the omniscient text all but confirms this.  There is some tension with timing at the end but ultimately this more like a social drama with a psychopath in the middle of it all.

Busby's introduction, which is mostly about the author's life and work than a dissection of the book itself, describes at is having the richest vein of black humour of all her books.  I think perhaps I should have read the introduction first (there are no spoilers, which I appreciate, as this is so often not the case), as I might have picked up on that. I wonder if this book is inspired by a savage critique of uncaring families, perhaps of one that Hilliard (actually Hilda Kay Grant) herself had experienced?  Every single character, except the young and a few side characters (whose best trait may be cluelessness or deliberate obtuseness to avoid social discomfort) are utterly self-serving.  The meagre reputation of small-town Ontario is the ultimate priority.  This rings true to my own upbringing in small town Vancouver Island.

I'm not sure I loved this book.  It was enjoyable and very well-written.  The pastoral Niagara Valley is richly portrayed and the people feel very real (and really awful).  As I said, I was a bit muddled with expectations as I was reading it but I think ultimately the heroine is too vacuous a character for me to have cared for her and the denouement does nothing to fill this out.  There was no satisfying punishment for the bad done, which is not a critique of the book (perhaps some might find this a superior conclusion), but also not to my simple tastes.  You should buy this book to judge for yourself at is nonetheless an important work in Canadian literature.