Book review: The Night of All Souls by Philippa Swan Vintage

The Night of All Souls by Philippa Swan

The Night of All Souls by Philippa Swan Vintage, $36
Reviewed by Louise Ward, Wardini Books.

In this wildly imaginative novel, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), long dead, finds herself in a warm, atmospherically lit drawing room, waiting to see who will join her for the evening.

Her husband arrives, then her deep love, her nemesis, a friend, a niece … and an empty chair that will be filled by a stranger. But to what end?

After this gleefully unusual and refreshing start, we begin to understand that in this novel we will see Edith as she has never been seen before.

There is a note for her from her (also long dead) editor about a soon to be released novella that she has the chance to stop should it reveal the secrets the world never knew.

The stranger in the last chair also has intelligence of events she shouldn't possibly know about. The haughty, repressed reputation of Mrs Wharton is set to be blown apart.

The story comes to us in three ways: Edith's reactions in the afterlife, the novella charting the travels of Sara, a modern day woman tasked with uncovering Edith who ends up on a journey of self-discovery, and a manuscript that the stranger, Mrs Gerould, would like to run past Mrs Wharton.

The ghostly assembly is shocked, cruelly amused, heartbroken and hurt by the revelations. Edith is scandalised, humiliated, vindicated, tempted to reveal her full self.

Edith is revealed in all her complexity. Not just the suffering wife of a disturbed husband but a passionate lover, intelligent and articulate writer and garden designer, widely travelled and admired by many.

The novel is a glimpse into how life goes on after us; the characters are unaware of what the others did and said after their deaths, until events are disclosed to them through the novella and Mrs Gerould's uncanny revelations.

The Night of All Souls is a refreshing, absorbing novel. The chance to see one's life after death, to recreate the narrative and see it as a newly rounded thing is a fascinating concept.

Edith Wharton is newly minted within these pages, finally broken free of the constraints of the society in which she lived.