The Thirteenth Tale (Book Review)

“Tragedy alters everything.”

If I wasn’t who I was yesterday, would I be who I am today? The past has a great bearing on the present and future, and in some cases where the past has been too turbulent and troubled, it may continue to affect one’s future till the very end.

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Vida Winter, like all bestselling authors (most bestselling authors) is a recluse. She lives in her own world, in a house with a big garden where no one is welcome, with only her staff and her cat for company. Like all recluses, she is perfectly fine in this world. Fine is perhaps not the right word if fine is a synonym for happy, I guess I meant functional. She pens book after book, each of them lapped by publishers and readers alike. However, no one, absolutely NO ONE knows who she is. What’s her past? Where is she from? Who were her parents? Does she have any brothers and sisters or friends or lovers? It is almost as if she emerged from nothing to this bestselling author with no period in between. Not even her public records are available. Her most famous work is called “ Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation” made famous by the lack of the thirteenth story, there are only twelve of them. Biographers and press flock to her hoping to get this story or her story but in vain. Sure, they get a story, but never the true one. And so it goes on for sixty or more years.

Margaret Lea is a voracious reader and a biographer of sorts, though hardly well-known. Her life is seemingly simple- she reads books and helps her father run their antiquarian book store, a store with collector’s and first editions and rare letters and so on, a reader’s paradise. She too has a secret past (who doesn’t?)

One day, she receives a hand-written letter from none but Vida Winter with a request to write her biography.

Distrustful, Margaret enters Vida’s world. How can she be sure of getting the truth when no one else before her has? But through a series of events, she finally accepts the job and so starts Vida’s story, a story within the story.

Angelfield House is where Vida was raised. Houses have personalities, don’t they? At least if not their own, they surely reflect the personalities of their owners and residents. And what can one expect of a house with many mad, crazed, eccentric residents? In the case of Angelfield House, each of its residents is weirder than the next. Charles and his sister Isabelle, Isabelle’s twin daughters Adeline and Emmeline, they are all complicated beings.

The story of Vida’s past, her home, her life is detailed wonderfully. The small details stand out. You yearn to know more… How the Missus prepared her meals, how the maid scrubbed the pot till it gleamed, how the cruel but efficient governess had her own ways of dealing with unruly kids. Between these details, bit by bit, you get to know the characters a little more. The loving and kind from the demonic and evil. At its essence though, this is a story of Adeline and Emmeline-of twins, how twins go beyond the realm of normal sibling attachment to a level that cannot be imagined by a non-twin, how they have their own language and world where there isn’t any room for others.

Margaret Lea too has a parallel story, she had a twin who died at birth, and Margaret without meeting her ever laments for her with an intensity that seemed unreal and uncanny to me. (though it might strike a chord with some)

Without sharing further lest I give out spoilers, I will ask you to read this one for the language, details, gothic atmosphere and an old, Victorian feel in a relatively new book (p.2006).

Simply put, The Thirteenth Tale is about loss that never healed. (“Is it possible for some losses to never heal?”, you’d wonder.)

Also, does having a cat make you more intriguing? Time to go get a cat if so! 😊