Things that go bump

The Girl On The Landing by Paul Torday. Photo / Supplied

Paul Torday is on the phone from his home in the North Tyne valley in Northumberland, talking about his disturbing new novel, The Girl on the Landing.

Part psychological thriller, part ghost story, surely he must credit some of its spine-crawling atmosphere to his "house" - Chipchase Castle, a 14th century garrison tower attached to a 17th century Jacobean mansion.

"You'd be a brave man to live here and say you absolutely didn't believe in ghosts," says Torday. "It's built around a hollow courtyard and part of it is uninhabitable - people moved out of it in the 14th century and never moved back in."

Torday has lived in the castle, which has been in his wife's family since the 1850s, for two decades. After a 30-year career running engineering firms in the Newcastle area, he was a latecomer to writing.

His first novel, the humorous and touching Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, was published to great acclaim two years ago, when Torday was 59, quickly followed by the equally accomplished The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, a backwards-told tale about a fine-wine alcoholic. So he's done funny, then bleak.

The Girl on the Landing is terrifying. It starts quietly enough, with London-based married couple Michael and Elizabeth - who have been together for 10 uneventful years - on a weekend break at a country house in Ireland.

First told from Michael's point of view, he is waiting for his wife to get dressed for dinner. Michael is looking out of the window, noting in great detail the colour of the autumn leaves, the hue of the evening sky, the "vibration of distant thunder".

As the couple, who barely seem to talk to each other, walk along the corridor, Michael sees a painting of a shadowed landing, with a linen press and a statue of an angel. He is intrigued by the faint figure of a female in a green dress in the background.

The next day, when he asks his hosts about the painting, "the one with the girl standing looking at the marble angel", they look puzzled, saying there's no girl in it. When he looks again, the figure has vanished. She will appear again - but not in a painting.

In the next chapter, told by Elizabeth, we learn that their marriage is merely "workable", that he was "the least exciting man" she had ever gone out with. He is wealthy, due to an inheritance from his parents, who both died in accidents, and he is reliable and boring. But, after the trip to Ireland, he starts to change.

Michael becomes a much more interesting, passionate man, and Elizabeth falls deeply in love with her husband. Then she discovers the pills in the bathroom cupboard. It eventually turns out that Michael is a schizophrenic who has decided to stop taking his medication and keeps meeting an increasingly vicious young lady dressed in green, called Lamia.

"I went on a fishing holiday in Ireland with my wife," explains Torday, "and we stayed in a house like the one I describe and I saw a picture like the one I describe with the figure of a woman in the background - it wasn't a spooky picture but it was a curious picture and I thought it had to be a good starting point for a story. But I didn't know what the story was. "I had a couple of goes to see where it would take me and it eventually turned into a ghost story or a psychological thriller, depending on which way you read the book."

Torday says he was trying to examine the modern practice of chemical management of psychosis. "We tend to be very dismissive of what we call mad people. What if their reality is as valid as ours? I know that seems a strange point but it's because we treat mentally disturbed people as not normal. We say that if you are not normal, you don't fit and we are going to treat you with anti-psychotic drugs until you do fit.

I suspect that 100 years ago, occasionally people were less judgmental and prepared to accept that mad people might have a place in society. They might be seeing things which other people can't see. If you go right back in time, mad people were sometimes thought to have divine insight.

"These days, people like Michael are locked up in a chemical prison. The impression I got from the research was that there is a tendency towards chemical treatment that assumes everything that is wrong with people can be cured by bombing them with these powerful anti-psychotic drugs that bring their own problems with them.

"It's an interesting moral dilemma - you engineer someone's personality. If they're a serial killer, you've probably got to do that but there must be a lot of people who might be better off being slightly dotty."

Michael's predicament was that the drugs had flattened out every aspect of his life, and he was smart enough to know he needed that to end. Torday describes the short period when Elizabeth and Michael fall in love as "the highlight".

All went downhill from there. "Does she want to be married to a grey zombie or does she want to be married to someone who is wonderful but totally unpredictable and probably dangerous?" Torday enjoyed writing about Michael's London club, Grouchers, a place he describes as "a very English template for stuffy normality, conformity, that on one level he is seeking to protect himself from his other half ... the other part of Grouchers is me having a bit of fun at the way the English are so bad at adapting to change and diversity."

As the novel progresses, and Michael starts to withdraw from the people he is closest to because he knows a crisis is looming, it's hard to tell whether he truly loves Elizabeth as he watches her and observes she is a "clever girl" - not in a nice way. "I was thinking about that as I was writing it and I really want the reader to make up their own mind on that. It could be either.

Towards the end he is becoming calculating and manipulative to protect himself but I did want to get across the idea that there has to be room for sympathy for people who are not able to conform, have got some sort of imbalance in their lives. "I tried to make Michael a more sympathetic character than Wilberforce but it's the same idea - you've got to feel there is some humanity in him. But if you read the research on people with his condition, manipulation is a key trait.

They develop chameleon-like skills so they can mimic what they think is the right behaviour." Lamia, the girl, is Torday's reference to the mythical female monster who devours children, and a homage to the Victorian ghost writer, M.R. James.

"I wanted to write something that could be interpreted at one level as a ghost story and I guess my model is M.R. James. A lot of his stories depend on suggestion and hint rather than upfront Friday the 13th horror. James wrote a ghost story which had a Lamia in it, a very different one which came out of a tomb in a cathedral, so this was a bit of a homage to him - he is my absolutely favourite writer."

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2007, a prize which rewards the writer with bottles of Bolly and a Gloucester Old Spot pig named after the novel. The year before, winner Christopher Brookmyre was thrown into the pen with the pig.

Torday laughs and says he avoided a similar fate by giving "all the people concerned a steely glare". Then he adds, a little wistfully, that he thought he was going to be allowed to bring the pig home. "My wife used to have a pet pig and we were looking forward to that. But I only got to meet it in the pen."

Some things, as Michael and Elizabeth discover, are best left penned up.

* The Girl on the Landing (Weidenfeld & Nicholson $38.99)