Bodies of Water by VH Leslie review: a pallid, lazy ghost story

Bodies of Water

Author: VH Leslie

ISBN-13: 978-1784630713

Publisher: Salt

Guideline Price: £8.99

There are many ways to imbue a novel with a sense of mystery and suspense. VH Leslie's preferred method is adjectival overload: the words "strange" or "strangely" appear no fewer than 30 times in Bodies of Water's 130 pages, followed in the superfluity stakes by "curious", "odd" and "uncanny". We are baldly informed that various happenings are "disquieting", "unsettling" and "surreal"; there is "something curious about" this and "something unnatural about" that.

Throw in some slapdash grammar (“none . . . were” instead of “none . . . was”, “as if she was” instead of “as if she were”) and several incidences of the inelegant solecism “was comprised of’ “, and the overall reading experience is less than edifying.

The chapters alternate between two stories set in the same location, a riverside mansion called Wakewater House. The first is set in the present day: the mansion has been converted into flats and newcomer Kirsten, who has split up with her partner, is disquieted and unsettled and all the rest when she finds it mysteriously leaking water. She befriends a neighbour, an older woman called Manon, an academic with an interest in the “fallen women” of the 19th century.

The second story is set in 1871, during Wakewater House’s heyday as a spa for women. Evelyn, who has been diagnosed with nervous tension and hysteria, has been sent there to undergo a dubious “water cure” treatment. She embarks upon a lesbian affair with a fellow patient, Blanche, and feels all kinds of rage towards the male doctors who run the establishment.

The two strands converge around the theme of women’s bodies. Prior to her voluntary confinement, Evelyn was involved in rescue work with prostitutes. Her resentment towards men centres on the cruel double standards of Victorian morality: “When the government declared that one in three men in the armed forces had venereal disease, what did they do to the men? Nothing. But any woman suspected of prostitution could be stopped by police and forced to an internal examination. Violated with speculums and medical equipment . . . ”

We learn that the river was a favoured suicide spot for fallen women; the water spirits – rusalka – that torment Kirsten are none other than the ghosts of those girls. Manon explains it thus: "Sometimes old places like this retain a bit of the past, in the fabric of the building, and occasionally, they seep." There is, in other words, nothing structurally wrong with the plumbing.

About midway through the story, it transpires that Evelyn once had an ill- fated affair with one of the girls she had rescued from a life of vice. This revelation – the rescuer recast as sexual predator – is perhaps the only instance in which this novel engages with psychological complexity. For the most part its moral universe is straightforward. The mystery of Wakewater House is solved a third of the way through, and thereafter everything is wearisome embellishment.

Bodies of Water breezes through the obligatory aquatic cultural references, from the classical – Neptune, succubi, etc – to paintings such as Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott and Millais's Ophelia; the limp denouement features a painfully trite reference to Virginia Woolf.

Ghostly assault

A key moment in the tale is when Evelyn assaults Blanche in a fit of pique: Evelyn believes the assault has been carried out by the jealous ghost of a former lover, but Blanche is in no doubt that Evelyn herself is to blame. This leaves open the intriguing possibility that the whole posse of apparitions, spectres and vengeful river nymphs alike, is little more than a series of hallucinations.

In which case, Bodies of Water becomes a story of mental illness, with the collective history of gender subjugation constituting both a causative factor and a symptomatic manic fixation. Such an interpretation might lend it a smidgen of literary credibility, but would not redeem the laziness of the prose.

Indeed, what is most striking about the novel is the disparity between the gravity of its allusions – the plight of countless women and girls in the Victorian era, their victimisation at the hands of both the state and the callous hypocrisy of respectable opinion – and its insipid, cliche-ridden narration.

In one characteristic passage, Kirsten considers going for a walk by the river, but is worried about encountering a certain long-haired woman who has been stalking the riverside, and whom she suspects might be a spectre: “Was she really a water spirit, a rusalka? It seemed better not to find out.”

There is a certain responsibility that comes with taking on so sensitive and historically weighty a topic. To treat it in such a singularly artless way is both belittling and exploitative.

Houman Barekat is a critic