HOST OF HAUNTS

DENNIS MCFARLAND TELLS A THOROUGHLY MODERN GHOST STORY

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 16, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

But first McFarland must imbue his story with a spectral credibility -- one that will pay off later, when the spirits appear -- and this he does with graceful forethought and panache. ``A Face at the Window'' is a pleasure on several levels, not least of which is its attention to genre and to the architecture of narrative. The literary masters of the supernatural, particularly the 19th-century ghost story, knew that behind every scary gust of wind blew a psyche in probable disrepair, and this symbolism -- this frightful possibility that one's inner demons are running the show -- is given great agency in McFarland's novel. As with Henry James's classic ``The Turn of the Screw,'' madness is running around here posing as an angel-faced boy, an embodiment with just enough ambiguity to make McFarland's story as ominous as it is realistic.

The sympathetic protagonist and narrator of the novel is Cookson Selway, a 43-year-old guy whose main life theme has been Self-Aware bumping into Self-Destruct. The youngest son of a stormy Southern family, he made a bundle of money selling cocaine, then funneling his profits into the restaurant business; he also got hopelessly strung out on drugs and alcohol. He emerged from detox more than a decade ago, amazed to find his finances and marriage mostly intact. Now he lives a quieter life near the Charles in Cambridge, thankful for what he didn't lose and determined not to blow it again. His wife, Ellen, is a mystery writer; their adolescent daughter, Jordie, is the daily sunshine in both their lives. The autumn she leaves for boarding school in Connecticut, they decide to avoid their painfully empty nest by heading to London, where Ellen can follow her fictional sleuth around and Cook can -- well, rest and read and do whatever it is that sweet-tempered venture capitalists do.

So Cook is set up from the beginning to be a kind of foil of his own excesses: Already toppled by hubris, redefined by humility, searingly conscious of his worst capabilities. We learn most of this in the opening pages of the novel, where Cook also has a couple of inexplicable encounters with the beasts of the parallel universe -- his Dalmatian assumes a ghostly glow one night in Cambridge, and he even begins to see outlines of human faces in an old medical X-ray. This equivocal vision hasn't shown up unannounced; Cook remembers spotting similar extra-dimensions as a boy, before alcohol blurred his powers into remission. All is not fully empirical in Cook's inner world, in other words, and yet he is so intimately (and likably) rendered that he seems more probably a witness to these events than their creator. By the time the curtains start to move to invisible breezes at the Hotel Willerton, we are enchantedly, if not utterly, in his thrall.

The creepiness begins on the day the Selways arrive in London, when, in the lift on the way to their quarters, Cook hears a piano playing Schubert that no one else seems to notice. (The third floor, where the music is coming from, has been shut down for renovations.) A charming young girl in a sailor dress approaches Cook one morning; when he tries to find out who she is, the hotel staff hasn't the foggiest notion. While Ellen goes off to do research -- like all good mystery writers, she is rooted in the tangible here-and-now -- Cook falls into a coma-like sleep; once there, he finds himself in the company of several dark-hearted spirits vying for his attention, and alluding to a sordid scenario from 70 years ago. With the help of Pascal, the charming young French porter, and an elderly couple from Hong Kong, the Sho-pans, Cook begins his own form of sleuthing: Beyond the Willerton's bright facade are other unsolved mysteries, including the newspaper story of a young girl who fell from a fifth-floor window in what is now the Selways' flat.

The further Cook goes into this shadowy corridor, the more he gambles his own assets: He shuns Ellen, takes solace in the drug-like allure of his ghostly seducers, retreats into the isolated glen that seems like solitude but, in fact, can be despair. His spectral cast, from the little boy whimpering from neglect to the Scotch-swilling rapscallion whom everyone fears, is a composition nearly parallel to his own provable past: an alcoholic father, a version of Cook as a boy, a lovely teenage girl who, like Jordie, is capable of black mood switches. Because he possesses, thanks to his creator, an inordinate self-consciousness, we are given to see this story as the multilayered metaphor it is. And because McFarland has infused his ghost story with that greater bugaboo, the alienation of the human condition, we don't know which prospect is more frightening: that Cook has invented these demonic presences, or that they are reinventing him.

A few of the circumstances in ``A Face at the Window'' are familiar to McFarland's previous fiction: a window ledge from which a body has fallen (``The Music Room''); an unsolved mystery that serves as a blueprint for more ethereal understanding (``School for the Blind''). He has dotted his text with fun allusions, from a couple of brokers named after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the small child who calls himself James, a la ``Turn of the Screw.'' Most of all, though, he has ignited his protagonist with the human qualities of rage, fear, and self-defeating ambivalence, and has done so with insight and compassion. One of the most frightening moments in Cook's pilgrimage with the damned is when he realizes the lack of consequence to his journey -- ignored even by his ghost, he is left ``alone with this terrible sense that nothing had any particular value, everything was of equal insignificance.'' That is a bedevilment closer to Beckett than to Poe, and far harder to chase away than a couple of spirits from the other side.

As a modern ghost story, full of lost souls and soulful introspection, ``A Face at the Window'' is a pleasant immersion: clever without being contrived, thoughtful without being maudlin. Because Dennis McFarland is a writer of considerable depth, it is also something more: a novel about lost sons and daughters, lost selves, wandering about in those fogbound outer territories, trying to get themselves home.

DENNIS McFARLAND

From ``A Face at the Window''