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Recent Reading has houses in it
Jan. 2nd, 2024 01:32 pmA Haunting on the Hill, by Elizabeth Hand.
This authorised sequel to The Haunting of Hill House was taking on a difficult task. I don't think it manages to live up to the earlier book, but it does get some good mileage out of bringing the earlier book to dwell unsettlingly inside itself. And this is one of those books where I so much wanted to know what happened next that I stayed up far too late reading it and finished it tired, which in itself recommends it even if I wasn't satisfied with where it got to.
The outline of the story is similar to the original: a group of people come to spend a few weeks in Hill House, and it Does Not Go Well. Where the original group were trying to study the house itself, and therefore treated its early manifestations merrily, this book has a group of people putting on a play, with their various degrees of investment in it.
I really like the whole opening sequence, sliding toward Hill House down a gentle greased slope. I like all the real estate details. Later on, what I said to myself was 'The special effects don't work': I'm neither as interested in what lies between these people, nor as frightened of how Hill House reaches out to exploit it, as I wanted to be.
Hand knows her folklore. This may be more effective for people who knows exactly what she's bringing in, or who know the original better than I do?
Fire & Decay - The Destruction of the Large New Zealand House, by Terence E.R. Hodgson.
This is an odd, not very good book: slender, illustrated with black and white with photos of houses which have since burned down or been demolished. You'd think from the title that it was about a systematic phenomenon, but it isn't really – except, I guess, for ‘Big houses were often made of wood here’ and ‘Rich people often stopped maintaining their houses because they lost their money or moved elsewhere’.
The book is made up of accounts of the houses and pocket biographies of their owners, but neither the houses' architectural points of interest, nor the stories of their collapse, nor the lives of their owners, are really dwelt on, and the photos often aren't great, leaving me unsure what the author's motivation was in putting the book together – except, perhaps, to gently compliment rich people. His view, coming across in offhand comments, is that society has forgotten what diligence it took to be an early settler with masses of family money. The introduction says the author will scrupulously avoid the term 'mansion' not only because most of the houses aren't big enough, (which seems true in many cases), but because "The term also reflects a style of wealthy ostentation which was actually repugnant to the early prosperous New Zealander." I feel that once he's talking about homeowners importing white swans to populate their artificial lakes, this claim begins to need some defending. (There's also a line praising the good work Edward Gibbon Wakefield did planning Wellington from a jail cell; the fact that he's in the cell for abducting a fifteen year old in order to marry her for her wealth is mentioned only so it can be minimized.)
The houses in this book I found fun to read about were The Wattles*, because it has trellises on it and plants growing all up to the second floor balconies, and its owner was a taxidermist and keen gardener; and Alexander Bickerton's Wainoni. Bickerton was a scientist with a passionately wrong theory about star formation: he thought new stars appearing in our sky were caused by two existing stars banging into each other and chunks breaking off them. In 1896, he turned his house into the Wainoni Federative Home, where thirty people shared out chores between them, some being employed elsewhere and some running the house’s firework factory. Sadly, all this was a complete economic failure, and the house, meant to house a hundred, soon dispersed. Bickerton disapproved publicly of marriage, so of course The Federative Home was in often in the papers of Canterbury as a hotbed of immoral sex as well as socialism. The essay I went off and read about him doesn't corroborate this book's assertion that his disapproval of marriage was based on his observation, as a government analyst, of many conjugal poisonings; what it does say is that he believed unwanted marriages were bad for women (true) and were also causing genetic deterioration of the species (false). This book doesn’t mention that he himself was married until two pages after stating his disapproval of marriage, and then only in the context of Mrs Bickerton becoming the house's sole resident after Mr Bickerton had moved back to England. The book doesn't mention that this took place after the house had been converted into an amusement park, which then also failed financially. I want to know more about all of this!
So yes, not a good book for general interest, and totally useless as research into Hamilton, which is the city I wanted to know about and which is skipped entirely. But a spur to further reading.
*all the house names in the book are italicised.
This authorised sequel to The Haunting of Hill House was taking on a difficult task. I don't think it manages to live up to the earlier book, but it does get some good mileage out of bringing the earlier book to dwell unsettlingly inside itself. And this is one of those books where I so much wanted to know what happened next that I stayed up far too late reading it and finished it tired, which in itself recommends it even if I wasn't satisfied with where it got to.
The outline of the story is similar to the original: a group of people come to spend a few weeks in Hill House, and it Does Not Go Well. Where the original group were trying to study the house itself, and therefore treated its early manifestations merrily, this book has a group of people putting on a play, with their various degrees of investment in it.
I really like the whole opening sequence, sliding toward Hill House down a gentle greased slope. I like all the real estate details. Later on, what I said to myself was 'The special effects don't work': I'm neither as interested in what lies between these people, nor as frightened of how Hill House reaches out to exploit it, as I wanted to be.
Hand knows her folklore. This may be more effective for people who knows exactly what she's bringing in, or who know the original better than I do?
Fire & Decay - The Destruction of the Large New Zealand House, by Terence E.R. Hodgson.
This is an odd, not very good book: slender, illustrated with black and white with photos of houses which have since burned down or been demolished. You'd think from the title that it was about a systematic phenomenon, but it isn't really – except, I guess, for ‘Big houses were often made of wood here’ and ‘Rich people often stopped maintaining their houses because they lost their money or moved elsewhere’.
The book is made up of accounts of the houses and pocket biographies of their owners, but neither the houses' architectural points of interest, nor the stories of their collapse, nor the lives of their owners, are really dwelt on, and the photos often aren't great, leaving me unsure what the author's motivation was in putting the book together – except, perhaps, to gently compliment rich people. His view, coming across in offhand comments, is that society has forgotten what diligence it took to be an early settler with masses of family money. The introduction says the author will scrupulously avoid the term 'mansion' not only because most of the houses aren't big enough, (which seems true in many cases), but because "The term also reflects a style of wealthy ostentation which was actually repugnant to the early prosperous New Zealander." I feel that once he's talking about homeowners importing white swans to populate their artificial lakes, this claim begins to need some defending. (There's also a line praising the good work Edward Gibbon Wakefield did planning Wellington from a jail cell; the fact that he's in the cell for abducting a fifteen year old in order to marry her for her wealth is mentioned only so it can be minimized.)
The houses in this book I found fun to read about were The Wattles*, because it has trellises on it and plants growing all up to the second floor balconies, and its owner was a taxidermist and keen gardener; and Alexander Bickerton's Wainoni. Bickerton was a scientist with a passionately wrong theory about star formation: he thought new stars appearing in our sky were caused by two existing stars banging into each other and chunks breaking off them. In 1896, he turned his house into the Wainoni Federative Home, where thirty people shared out chores between them, some being employed elsewhere and some running the house’s firework factory. Sadly, all this was a complete economic failure, and the house, meant to house a hundred, soon dispersed. Bickerton disapproved publicly of marriage, so of course The Federative Home was in often in the papers of Canterbury as a hotbed of immoral sex as well as socialism. The essay I went off and read about him doesn't corroborate this book's assertion that his disapproval of marriage was based on his observation, as a government analyst, of many conjugal poisonings; what it does say is that he believed unwanted marriages were bad for women (true) and were also causing genetic deterioration of the species (false). This book doesn’t mention that he himself was married until two pages after stating his disapproval of marriage, and then only in the context of Mrs Bickerton becoming the house's sole resident after Mr Bickerton had moved back to England. The book doesn't mention that this took place after the house had been converted into an amusement park, which then also failed financially. I want to know more about all of this!
So yes, not a good book for general interest, and totally useless as research into Hamilton, which is the city I wanted to know about and which is skipped entirely. But a spur to further reading.
*all the house names in the book are italicised.
