The Visitor: quick links
One of author Rebecca Starford’s most notable achievements is co-founding the independent online literary magazine Kill Your Darlings with Hannah Kent. Starford has followed this with her memoir Bad Behaviour and novels The Unlikely Spy and The Imitator. Her new novel is The Visitor, which could be classified into the subgenre of Queensland Gothic or, as the author describes it, ‘the domestic uncanny’.
The visitor of the title alludes to the possible haunting of true crime writer and creative writing teacher Laura and her family, specifically in her parents’ old Queenslander house in Brisbane’s Paddington. ‘Ghosts live in the sunshine too.’
Laura, her husband Andrew and their 14-year-old daughter Tilly are leading a comfortable life in rain-cloistered Oxfordshire in the UK until her parents’ bodies are found in remote Hell Hole Gorge National Park in the Queensland outback. Bruce and Eliza’s hasty departure from Brisbane is outlined in the Prologue to establish the intrigue. Why did they leave? Did they die because of ill-health, misadventure or something else?
The family pack up swiftly and fly to Brisbane to settle the parents’ affairs and possibly make a fresh start. Andrew’s career as a property developer has stalled. He needs a new project to wipe the family’s debts and has grand plans to renovate the old house. The author makes some pointed asides here about Australia’s prohibitive housing and the impossibility for the young to enter the property market.
Things start to go wrong: Laura looks unwell and behaves strangely. She feels threatened by her childhood friend Anita, who has grown close to Laura’s parents at the same time they have become estranged from their daughter. Anita believes that the house has been left to her to run as a community centre. This causes further disquiet. Meanwhile, Tilly seems to be falling under the faintly malevolent influence of Anita’s daughter, Ava.
The Visitor: alive to tension
The house and its haunting presence on those who inhabit it or live nearby is the frightening heart of the tale. ‘As she stood on the threshold, she felt herself being tugged inside … The house seemed to breathe out, alive to that tension.’
Tropes of the witchy woman, the mutable photo and the typewriter that seems to write by itself are interwoven with careful ambiguity. Books by Australian authors are cited by name and Patrick White’s novel Voss is quoted to atmospheric effect.
Comparisons between Brisbane and Oxford are an interesting, sometimes cringeable, aspect of the story. Oxford is refined, safe and wet. Brisbane is swelteringly hot with an outdoorsy, freer lifestyle. Even though it has grown and changed since Laura’s youth, it is caricatured as a place full of spiders, cockroaches and men who wear socks with sandals. The narrative set in Brisbane is very place-specific with many suburbs, schools and landmarks, such as the historic Toowong Cemetery, mentioned.
The Visitor: intergenerational relationships
The novel explores themes of intergenerational relationships, particularly through the three generations of women to whose voices we are privy, and how people grieve in different ways. Laura moves into manic mode as she makes lists and writes detailed notes about the renovation. Andrew stays outside organising the practical aspects of the build. Or is he? Tilly is homesick, isolated and emotional.
Read: Introvert’s Guide to Leaving the House review: Jenny Valentish’s book helps the socially anxious
The Visitor is an ideal holiday or escapist read. It rises above other books in the genre with its skilled seeding of cryptic supernatural elements from the start, although it has some clunky imagery. The Visitor is compulsive reading for those who enjoy the works of Kate Morton and Anna Downes and will be an ideal companion to Jessica Dettman’s new novel, Your Friend and Mine.
The Visitor by Rebecca Starford is published by Allen & Unwin.
