The Servants
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
For young Mark, the world has turned as bleak and gray as the Brighton winter. Separated from his real father and home in London, he's come to live with his mother and her new husband in an old house near the sea. He spends his days alone, trying to master the skateboard, while other boys his age are in school. He hates the unwanted stepfather who barged into Mark's life to rob him of joy. Worst of all, his once-vibrant mother has grown listless and weary, no longer interested in anything beyond her sitting room.But on a damp and chilly evening, an accident carries Mark into the basement flat of the old woman who lives at the bottom of his stepfather's house. She offers tea, cakes, and sympathy...and the key to a secret, bygone world. Mark becomes caught up in the frenetic bustle of the human machinery that once ran a home, and drawn ever deeper into a lost realm of spirits and memory. Here below the suffocating truths, beneath the pain and unhappiness, he finds an escape, and quite possibly a way to change everything.A richly evocative, poignantly beautiful modern-day ghost story, The Servants marks the triumphant return of Michael Marshall Smith—the first novel in a decade from the multiple award-winning author of Spares.
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This was a great and engaging little read, a modern day ghost story and coming of age story wrapped together. The ghost story is used as a metaphor for what is happening in the boy's life (at least that is how I took it) and I found it to be beautifully done. My only complaint is that I wish the novel had been a bit longer allowing for some of the characters to be a bit more fleshed out.
Not bad, not bad. Not as good as some of his short stories I've read. Perhaps, for me, told a bit too much from the main character's p.o.v. Mark read a little too much like angsty Harry Potter in ‘The Order of the Phoenix. It gets a trifle tedious and annoying. But it's a bit interesting, how the ghostly servants actually fit into his life. I goofily spent part of the book trying to figure out exactly how butlers and housekeepers and maids fit into the story of Mark and his stepfather and cancer-ridden mother. I perhaps should have figured it out earlier, but–ah, well. Sometimes, that just doesn't happen. That gave the novel a nice, interesting twist.
Still, I felt like Mr Smith was somehow limiting himself in this one. There were paragraphs that were good writing, lovely. And then the narrative would go back to being childish and awkward. I don't think writing from a child's p.o.v. should necessarily be that awkward. But, maybe if I were eleven and reading this I'd feel differently.
