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Review: Sharing the Stage with a Ghost

What happens when you cross Psycho with The Phantom of the Opera? You get Ghost Song. It sounds comical, even disappointing when you get to read the uninspiring lyrics.

A singing ghost haunts the old Tarleton Music Hall, which has been lying in a state of disuse for almost a century, to claim his share of the dark spotlight. Sarah Rayne is benevolent to her apparition because there’s nothing sinister about this nocturnal ghoul, that is until a surveyor stumbles upon a skeleton behind a secret wall and the past comes tumbling out.

But if you are a free spirit willing to be led, even fleetingly, into the dark recesses of the mind with a sprinkling of history, the result is surprisingly enjoyable and definitely not too over-the-top.

So, we’re back at the beginning with the author taking us to the start of the First World War in 1914. It was the sum of all fears, the war of wars, something the world had never seen before. Rayne starts spinning her well conceived yarn with war-mongering in the background and the Tarleton as the prop.

The ease at which she introduces historical figures, places and events in an otherwise dark work of fiction is admirable. Among the flood of characters is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, who is murdered by Gavrilo Pincip, a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Soon, all hell breaks loose across Europe.

But the writer doesn’t go further than some fleeting references to what sparked off the Great War and how her actor hero, Toby Chance of the Tarleton, gets embroiled in the assassination in far-away Sarajevo. Toby should have stayed at home in London to soak in the applause and write more songs like Ghost Walks and Tipsy Cake, she suggests. But the restless young man is easily lured by the sounds of a revolution, only to find himself used as a political puppet by vengeful villain Anton Reznik, who wants to settle personal scores with his father, Hal Chance, a distinguished official with the British Foreign Service.

The novelist doesn’t care much even as the plot takes a plunge, literally, into another era. She makes motive her motto and seeks refuge in desultory events. Reader interest wanes rapidly in these sections, as a spell of the darkness envelopes you. But Rayne snaps us back to the present with covert investigations into the history of the Tarleton led by Robert Fallon and Hillary Bryant, who have fallen in love with the place for no sane reason. Hillary’s boss, Shona Seymour, is a natural born killer like her father and takes pains to hide her dirty little secret. She heads the society which handles the maintenance of the Tarleton and wants the building closed indefinitely as she fears the old theatre coming to life will lift the veil on her past when murders were only growing up pangs.

Rayne’s take on Shona is a wasted effort in an apparent attempt to spook you out of your wits, but she fails miserably. The prose is dank in these chapters which slips below mediocrity and could have been avoided. Haphazard sketches of past and present characters does no good to the patched up narrative, sometimes making you flip back three pages to get a grip on the proceedings. The author’s grasp of theatre is put to fine use with interesting tidbits on Edwardian theatre thrown in with the cultural history of that time. Rayne writes like a dream, except when she tries to get to the bottom of her characters, constantly prodding and throwing them off guard. The ghost is a tease... a no-show with a song and no soul.

allan@khaleejtimes.com

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