Over the years, readers have read Daisy Rockwell as a translator of Hindi and Urdu. They have heard her champion the art and political necessity of translated literature. And now, we have the 2022-International Booker Prize-winning translator return as a novelist – her debut novel, Taste, was published in 2014 – with Alice Sees Ghosts. Strange, mercurial, yet heartening, this novel establishes Rockwell as a chronicler of stories and ideas through ghosts, spirits and pasts.

Listening to voices

It begins with Alice finding herself unable to talk like others do. She feels she hears more than she should and hence speaks by writing. At her ancestral home, she shuffles between her bedridden grandmother, Nanette and her alcoholic mother, Clare. Both seem to sap from Alice the joys of truly being alive. When Alice isn’t deflecting her fiancé, Ronit’s attempts at a marriage proposal, she mostly reads and listens to voices. One fine day, she finds her dead grandfather sitting on his chair in his study with a book. As she came closer, he disappeared. This episode repeats itself a number of times until she is convinced that he has risen from the dead to communicate with her. Alice sets out on a long, tremulous journey trying to understand what his ghost, and the other ghosts that keep coming and going, try to ask of her. As she sees the ghosts, her family truths begin to unravel and haunt her.

In a recent interview, Rockwell said, “My mother raised me to believe in ghosts and there are many tales of family hauntings. To me, this is not the supernatural but realism.” The book plays around with these ideological leanings of the real and imagined from the start to the end. It does not see the two as distinct. We have Alice’s fiancé, Ronit, a psychiatrist, to be the voice of a rational audience who want to not believe in them. He is desperate to flag this off as “some sort of Enid Blyton novel, creeping about a decaying haunted mansion, looking for clues.” But Alice is certain that she is not hallucinating and that there is something real in what she could have otherwise imagined. Rockwell treats the phantasmal parts of the novel almost too well to make her readers believe in Alice and the set of events that send her packing to India in a maniacal search for the “truth”.

The blurb makes it seem that a larger chunk of the novel is set in India, where a woman must discover secrets from the past. However, Alice is in India for a brief period, and that surprises the reader. Rockwell is careful in managing this trope of a white woman flying to India to discover secrets that could change the course of her life. She deftly captures the somnolent beauty of the country both through the native (Ronit) and distant (Alice) gaze. In doing so, the novel strictly avoids the exoticisation of the East. We see India for the various problems it holds for the characters. For Ronit, it is a relief to have made Alice meet his parents and at the same time, a stressful event because Alice is stubborn in her ways. For Alice, however, it is a place that is sensually exciting but also troubling for the ghosts that have followed her here.

Late into the novel, Alice says, “Before, there was a ghost…He was not alive, but he was just another person in the house. But now – now I feel unseen presences – spirits. I dreamed of something like spirits last night…but there was a malign presence moving through the dreams.” It comes at a critical moment in the story. Alice is unravelled not only to the readers but also to Ronit. The relationship that she shares with Ronit is a grossly unequal one. Throughout the novel, we find Alice lugging Ronit into her troubled mind and life. It almost seems unfair the way Alice treats him but in moments such as the aforementioned quote, a glimpse of their intimacy is revealed. An imperfect character though Alice may be, she makes her presence bearable despite her flaws and triumphs. It makes Alice more real than the imaginations that fuel her actions. She steps out of the pages and speaks to the reader from her often ambiguous comportments.

A party to obsessions

To an astute reader, this novel will be less about merely making discoveries to uncover truths. The story is more a fractured mosaic of a family that has accumulated too many slippages. Rockwell is not on a mission to solve problems. She is writing about the problems rather. The different ways in which families work. The residues of said and unsaid words. And the behavioural and emotional displacement it brings to each family member as one enters and another departs. The reader is drawn into the story from the first page and cannot help but be party to Alice’s obsessions, be drunk in Clare’s madness, and be as shocked and anxious as Ronit.

Rockwell’s writing has the agility to flow seamlessly. It rarely drifts off the page and relates to the reader what is precisely at point: Alice’s ghosts. It is layered with humour and makes the reader giggle between scenes that are presented as intense. Her writing embodies the 20th-century style with long paragraphs and a sartorial tone in describing characters and their histories. One cannot but remember the eeriness of Shirley Jackson, the charm of Barbara Pym, the humour of Barbara Comyns, the critical eye of Muriel Spark, or the family drama of Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Rockwell also seems to pay homage to these writers who shaped 20th-century literary fiction in a predominantly male world. Although we do not have a spinster here, Rockwell manages to include characters like Clare, Nanette, Hyacinth, Violet and Alice as women who live on the edges without men clawing their lives. If Alice were an older woman, one could easily imagine her as Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes flying around the world to save herself from ruin.

Rockwell’s novel is a compulsive read. The experience of breathlessness while reading it fits perfectly with the sombre yet curious atmosphere of the plot. It is haunting, rich, and funny. One starts the novel with a note of concern for a sad, hapless and emotionally insensate Alice. But as you near the end, you begin to see Alice as a woman who is driven by ambition, is set in her beliefs, and can be emotionally cagey if not probed. Horror writing of such nature, where ideas brim alongside a tight storyline, is a reader’s delight.

Rahul Singh is a writer and an academic based in Kolkata.

Alice Sees Ghosts, Daisy Rockwell, Bloomsbury India.

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