Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale is a classic gothic suspense tale, the eerie love child of Jane Eyre and Fall of the House of Usher. Like so many good books, this one begins with a mysterious letter to the narrator, the bookish biographer Margaret Lea. The letter is from Vida Winter, the legendary writer famous for the fantastical stories she spins both in her novels and her interviews. After a lifetime of hundreds of invented biographies, she is haunted by a plea from a long ago interviewer: tell me the truth. At the end of Winter’s life, the truth begs to be free. And thus begins the memoir that unravels the mystery of the greatest living writer in the English language, as well as Margaret’s own dark secret.
Vida Winter’s life begins only as a subplot. The main heroes are the tragically eccentric lords of Angelfield manor and the demons that haunt its halls. The story starts with a neglected brother and sister and the affair that consumes their lives whole. Meanwhile, two feral twin girls roam the estate free to pursue every destructive whim, while the house and all its inhabitants slowly fall into a state of complete isolation and depravity. Only a complete tragedy can mold one of the wild twins into Vida Winter, the world-famous writer. The denouement concludes with a juicy plot twist that turns the story on its head.
Throughout the novel, Setterfield expertly weaves in the theme of twinness, that paradox of duality and completeness. Sister and sister, life and death, lies and truth. One cannot be without the other, but what happens when one half is taken away? Through the metaphor, Setterfield explores the psyches of people whose lives have been irrevocably broken in half, but who must muddle on just the same. The macabre tale tugs on familiar heart strings as the characters desperately long for completeness. The roller coaster plot pulls us in, but it is the characters’ poignant yearning that holds us in and does not let us go.
