The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale
by
Diane Setterfield

A young woman, Margaret Lea, the daughter of a bookshop owner, receives an interesting letter from a famous British writer, Vida Winter. The young woman is an amateur biographer, as she describes herself, "...a dilletante, a talented amateur". The writer is a famous recluse, but also recognized as Britain's greatest living author.
The two work out a deal for Lea to listen to Winter's tale and write it into a biography. The deal that Lea demands is that she be told the truth. Winter's deal is that she tell the story her way and not answer questions.
The story starts out with Winter recalling first her grandparent's life, then her parent's life as well as he rather wild and eccentric younger years with her twin sister. It is a story of mental illness as viewed by outsiders, and manipulation and sadism when viewed by insiders.
Lea takes a few days off to try and verify Winter's story. Lea travels first home and then to Winter's childhood home which had been badly burned and is waiting to be torn down so that a hotel could be built. Lea meets one fo the neighbors, whom she at first thinks is a ghost or another monster. He turns out to be an older man who runs his own catering business. The two strike up a new friendship over tea taken outside.
Eventually Winter reveals what she is going to of her story, but it is Lea's insights and discoveries that bring out the truth. Lea is able to unwind all of the mysteries before Winter succumbs to her illness. Based upon the discoveries she has made, Lea decides not to publish the biography she has written, but instead releases to the world the last story that Winter wrote - the so-called missing 13th tale, which Lea knows to be a version of Winter's own early childhood.
-----
What a splendid book. Or at least I think it is, I did not realize until the voice at the very end gave the credits that this was an abridged version. I try very hard to only listen to unabridged - and when I saw the entry for this item in the library's catalog, I assumed that the other library's would be as my own, where the thoughtful librarian only gets the unabridged audio versions. Alas, there may not be an unabridged version, but the story was still good, if not shorter.
Recently I have been reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and those are still my genres of choice. But, I have been feeling a bit boxed in - that this fantasy was too similar to that one, that this sci-fi was low on the sci and heavy on the melodrama. I decided to take a break from my genre pieces and so asked for recommendations. This book was the first of those, though I do have one fantasy book left to get through - book five of a five-part series (the last Percy Jackson book) - but I wanted to get started.
And what a start this book was. Writing a book about writer being interviewed by a biographer could have been all wonky or self-referential, but instead turned out to be a nice mystery to be solved by the biographer even as she saw the reflections of her own struggles and used what she saw as a catharsis to turn her life from one that she is not completely in control of into one which follows a path she is setting.
The nice thing about mysteries appearing in a non-genre piece is that they do not have to follow the genres rules. There were no cops, no private detectives, no one actively trying to solve a mystery, for only when the old woman reveals her story is there a mystery revealed. And the protagonist isn't trying to solve a mystery, even though she does, she is just trying to get as close as she can to the truth for her biography.
This book quite reminded me of "The Prestige" by Christopher Priest, not only by twins playing key roles, but by twins who had lost their sibling and felt their spirit. That seems quite an odd thing to be picked up by two novelists, both British, incidentally. Maybe there is some cultural phenomenon that I am not picking up on? Both books also have just a touch of the super-natural, but it's not in your face, it's the kind of thing that may be dismissed as the narrator's whimsey, and depending upon my mood will be taken either of the ways intended.