These voices are similar enough to fuse together, in much the same way that the multiple narrators of 'Wuthering Heights' blur into one. The story is told in several 'narratives,' first-person documents written by Constance, the lawyer and a woman named Eleanor Unwin, who disappeared from Wraxford Hall without a trace several years earlier. 'The Seance' isn't as ingenious and adventurous as Harwood's first novel, 'The Ghost Writer,' partly because he doesn't give his gift for literary ventriloquism quite so free a rein. He's too sophisticated not to understand that it's melodramatic camp, and he's also sophisticated enough to say, But so what? Personally, I feel almost pathetically grateful when a writer as intelligent and talented as Harwood is willing to indulge my appetite for such things. If a sentence like that makes you grip the covers of a book in ecstasy, then look no further. Then Constance inherits Wraxford Hall from a distant and previously unknown relative, but the lawyer who gives her the news recommends that she 'sell the Hall unseen burn it to the ground and plough the earth with salt, if you will, but never live there.' This experiment ends badly, to say the least.

This property is inherited by one of the novel's narrators, Constance Langton, the daughter of an indifferent father and a mother so stricken by the loss of another child that the only way Constance can reach her is to encourage her belief that she can contact the dead daughter through a spiritualist. 'The Seance' is a solid, old-fashioned gothic involving several generations of reclusive, obsessive squires and a mouldering old manor house set in the midst of an encroaching, reputedly haunted forest. Are they cursed by the past, visited by the dead, condemned by fate? Or are they deceived, by others and by themselves, about the nature of the universe and the human heart?

John Harwood's elegant new novel, ' The Seance,' describes the mixed fortunes of several characters who seem to be suspended over that line. The late 19th century was, like our own time, preoccupied with the dividing line between the scientific and the paranormal.

The Seance by John Harwood