[Review] Elaine di Rollo: 'Bleakly Hall'

Bleakly Hall is a crumbling, rumbling, mildewed hydropathic institution, where aging, gouty residents try to regain their once lost health via its supposedly curative waters. They drink the foul smelling and tasting water, they bath and shower in the hope to cure their sometimes vague ailments.

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The story of 'Bleakly Hall' alternates between the horrors of the trenches and the casualties of the First World War, and its aftermath when several of the survivors meet in Bleakly Hall. Roberta Montgomery ('Monty') is a nurse who worked in hospitals near the front line and drove an ambulance with Ada to rescue wounded soldiers.

Monty takes a poorly paid job at Bleakly Hall and appears to have a score to settle with Captain Foxley, Ada misses her wartime sense of purpose, the Blackwood brothers must reinvigorate or reinvent Bleakly Hall for a new era and Captain Foxley has his own particular ways of keeping his ghosts at bay. Can the story be classified as a mystery? Not really, but everyone has their own secrets to live with.

Other reviews tried to make sense of the novel by calling it a tragicomedy or creatively describing the story as 'swung so acrobatically between lightly carbonated comedy and pitch-black horror'. They are all wrong, but I admit that I was puzzled too at first. I felt a bit like the Sorting Hat in the novels of Harry Potter that had a hard time deciding in which House it would put Harry: 'Difficult. Very difficult'. But then, suddenly, I understood.

The residents of Bleakly Hall were all suffering physically and mentally from their harrowing experiences at the front. The main characters clearly exhibit the telltale signs of a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), such as mood swings, trouble sleeping, forgetting (inability to recall), repression, depression, irritability, sudden outbursts of anger and difficulty in concentrating. Everybody has its own personal ways of dealing with their ghosts of the past.

Elaine di Rollo has managed to write an engrossing story. I imagine the immensely moving and intensely tragic tale of 'Bleakly Hall' can produce a secret tear or two from readers. Buy it and read it!

Elaine di Rollo is now writing under her own name, E.S. Thomson, and recently published 'Beloved Poison'. For a review see here.