Synopsis "A beleaguered city (in English)"
"A Beleaguered City: " A summary In brief: it is the story of the citizens of a town who are driven outside their walls when their dead invade their city and push them out. Although the story opens in summertime, within a very few pages natural world suddenly becomes wintry, the days short and bleak, the sky one in which we expect snow. The citizens are terrified by nothing but a deep sense of thousands of dead people who they once knew inhabiting their houses, streets, intimate spaces. The prelude tells of several incidents which show people no longer really believe in another world, or, at least don't act as if they do, incidents in which a few people explicitly argue that the new God is Money. The technique recalls Collins in that it is a series of narratives told by different people who are our reporters, each of whom experienced the incident differently given their character, perspective, tasks, sex, circumstances. The "feel" of the story, as I just said, reminds me of Camus's The Plague: the central narrator is the Mayor, a man who prides himself on his rationality. As we go deeper into the narratives, we find ourselves reading a visionary all the town always despised; the mayor's wife, a deeply emotional woman. The key incident for many in the town is they are made to feel the presence of some beloved person who has died. The visionary may have made love to a dead wife; the Mayor's wife saw a dead daughter's face; the dead leave curious tokens, ring bells, made uncanny noises. There is an atmosphere of suspended awe which is compelling; there are numbers of allusions to Dante's Commedia which made me think Oliphant was consciously creating in little a Victorian journey to that realm of the mind, imagination, myth, religion (what you will) that Dante did before her. Her Land of Darkness makes a similarly effective use of Dante's Inferno and Purgatio. One source of the power of Oliphant's ghost stories, their content, and themes is, as most biographers and critics agree, her crushing bad luck in losing a husband to TB, two sons before they reached 30, a nephew whom she brought up (died in India), and a daughter at age 12. She was like old lady Mary in that she adopted a girl; however, Mrs Oliphant left a will: ). She yearns to make contact again, and yet the whole idea of a world of the dead surrounding one is dreadful, one which can drive one mad. Her pictures of the afterlife and the afterworld are frightening, anything but consoling. There is no benign justice and no easy comfort in these stories.
