I stumbled across this novella as a “popular penguin” in a bookstore in the city and recalled that I had enjoyed a short story by Jackson called “The Summer People”, so I bought it and what a amazing book it is. Coincidentally the next day ABC Radio National’s Book Show had a piece on Jackson as she had just had a Library of America commemorative edition of her works published. You can listen to the broadcast here. Apparently Jackson is being “revived” now because her gothic works published in the 1940s and 50s were dismissed – at the time, and up until quite recently.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a brilliant piece of controlled narrative. The story is told in the first person by eighteen year old Merricat (a contraction of Mary Catherine) who lives in a crumbling mansion with her older sister Constance and her Uncle Julian, an invalid. Our sense of Merricat’s isolation and strange notions builds as we follow her on her weekly trip into the hated local village for supplies, but Merricat is so single minded, and so witty, that by the time the dark side of her nature is revealed, the reader is completely won over. Or, at least this reader was.
In an essay appended as an afterword (don’t read it first as there are spoilers in it) Joyce Carol Oates likens Merricat to those other famous young narrators of American fiction: Frankie in The Member of the Wedding, Scout in To Kill a Mocking Bird and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The striking thing about Merricat is that her logic is the logic of a wild animal and her will to survive on her own terms has all the poignancy of The Call of the Wild or Auster’s Timbuktu or Sonya Hartnett’s Forest, for that matter. Jackson brilliantly pulls the reader into the book so that we are helplessly on Merricat’s side revelling in her crystal clear, darkly comic vision.