The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson

The rocks glow red above the sea, embers of the day’s heat below our balcony at the Hotel Marie.

Down here, on the southern rim of the country, out of the mistral’s slipstream, the evening drops like viscous liquid: slow and heavy and silent. When we first arrived, the stifling sultriness made sleep impossible; night closed in like the lid of a tomb.

Now, in the few hours I do sleep, I dream of all we have left behind: the hamlet on the hill and the whispering trees. Then, with a start, I'm awake again, remembering.

Until it happens to you, you don’t know how it will feel to stay with a man who has done a terrible thing. Not to know whether the worst has happened or is yet to come; wanting so badly to trust him now.

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Title: The Lantern
Author: Deborah Lawrenson
ISBN: 9780062049698
Publisher: Orion Books/2011
Pages: 341

Some might feel the prose as overwritten but I felt that the rich and detailed prose totally sets the mood of the novel. Lush it is, lyrical it is not. And after a few pages, it draws us in. 

The narrator has fallen in love with Dom, who composes musician. He seems to be rich. Dom calls her Eve. Soon after they both move to Provence, Les Genévriers. It seems to be falling apart yet Eve loves the house. She can feel someone being always present in that house.
Dom is not comfortable taking about his first wife, Rachel. But Sabine, a local woman, wants Eve to talk about Rachel with Dom. She has her own reasons. Somehow the stay in Les Genévriers does not seem conducive for both but they are reluctant to acknowledge that fact. Then three local girls go missing. And two bodies are found in the grounds of Les Genévriers while landscaping for a garden. Who bodies are those?

A parallel story is about Bénédicte Lincel, who had lived all her life in that house. She is the other narrator, an old woman, and she sees ghosts in the form of her evil brother Pierre and older sister Marthe, a blind perfumer, who had disappeared from her life abruptly. The blindness is symbolic too, in a way. The Lincel family is blind to the faults of the sadist Pierre. 

The novel goes forward by alternate narration by Eve and Bénédicte Lincel. Both the story lines seem unconnected but it all unravels in the end. The Lantern has some supernatural elements, just right for my taste. There are many flaws but it is what makes the novel interesting. It has the right amount of Gothic element.

In many review, I read that, The Lantern gives us a strong feeling about being similar to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I did not think so. Rachel is nothing like Rebecca. And the only similarity is that in both novels, the narrators are unnamed.