The Malan Witch - Shadowy, Arcane and Unrelenting
A third of the way through The Malan Witch, Catherine Cavendish’s wittily fey and eldritch new novel, principal protagonist, caring aunt, and all-around good egg, Robyn Crowe, is assaulted by an angry crow (irony acknowledged) and forced towards a defensive counter-posture, employing a nearby sickle in attempted defense. It’s a stark scene yet comical in its visuals, conjuring both Tippi Hedren and Raoul Duke, the latter swinging madly at winged adversaries of his own lysergic design. Beyond its corporal immediacy, however, is its function as ersatz demonstration of man’s intractable fecklessness in the face of both the natural and preternatural. Swing the scythe all you want, you can’t beat what you can’t understand. And you certainly can’t best what subsumes you.
The battle against the dark begins shortly after the novel does, but in a very real sense the race is run before the very first page. Robyn, newly widowed and grieving, escapes from London to her sister’s reconditioned cabin in rural Britain: an area one would be tempted to describe as “quaint” were it not for the repeat appearances of black-hooded figures darkly holding sway long enough to frighten, yet evanescing with time to claim cognitive plausible deniability. Menacing visions aside, this place--the fictional coastal town of St. Oswell--is clearly no Star’s Hollow: locals are standoffish and brusque, many segueing from disinterested to repelled once they learn where, exactly, Crowe is calling her temporary bulwark.
The Malan Cottage, the abandoned chateau Robyn’s sister Holly purchased as an escape from the din of present-day London, has a long and fraught history within the restricted confines of its bucolic demesne: the name itself, “Malan”, representing one of the Devil’s right-hand demons. Said satanic general reared his children on the grounds of the Crowe family’s new home away from home. According to legend, gamely relayed by a local baker/café-owner with familial ties to cottage-lore, “there were two witches living there back in Tudor times, and they were burned for practicing the craft. That and being heretics. They denied the church and openly worshiped the Devil.” Eventually, a hero named Chesten Denzel (ancestor to the pastry purveyor relaying the tale) volunteered to cleanse the area of the witches. She fashioned two poppets, one for each sister. She carried silver bodkins which she would press into the dolls where their hearts would be. Denzel utters various incantations and then hides one doll by the door and one in the chimney, sealing the two ways a witch could enter. Job seemingly complete, Denzel is pecked to death by crows leaving cottage grounds: retribution by the rebuffed sisters. Nevertheless, in these kinds of stories there is no such thing an unsuccessful martyr and the cottage remains hoodoo-free, until it doesn’t. Things never go well for families unlucky enough live there in the interim.
This brings us to the Crowes. Upon closing, Robyn’s sister, Holly, stumbles upon one of the dolls and, aghast, throws it in the fire, it apparently being a buyer’s market for cursed artifacts. This releases one of the witches, Jowanet, who moves forward with plans to free her sister as well. She begins attacking oneirically, Holly’s daughter who at age nine is just of shy of when girls are most vulnerable to psychic forces. Holly and her family, concerned yet dismissive, return to London and Robyn moves in to center her grief. Almost immediately, she’s assaulted by foul odors and aggressive birds, not to mention the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t dark figures. She also finds various stones with holes in their centers: hag stones to ward occult influence. After an array of additional foreboding and malign events, it becomes apparent that the witches must be destroyed lest Jowanet continue her demonic tortures in pursuit of sororal parity. Even as far away as London, she can still affect influence over Holly’s unsuspecting daughter. With the help of a “White Witch” whose presence vacillates between comforting and dangerous, a showdown with the Malan Witch is arranged. Things get decidedly scarier from there: merciless attacks on the defenseless, deadly incarcerations in a distilled world called, “The Dark Place” and a pursuit of the innocent heartless enough to unnerve even the most jaded of readers.
The novel is very much one of the black arts: shadowy, arcane and unrelenting. Jowanet, a lithe and sibilant Diamanda Galas, needles her way into each peak of the story’s gnarled topography. She is a force that will not be denied. But just as importantly, it is a story about family. Through sensitive, perceptive prose, Cavendish drills down on the love between sisters—Robyn and Holly and their fuliginous doppelgangers, Jowanet and Zenobie—as well spousal and parental love. As the novel barrels towards its conclusion, the boundaries between violence and bond blur and their entanglement occasions an analysis of the indelible properties of anger, ferocity, debt and love. These slightly more gossamer themes, though heady, in no way tamp down the book’s unrelenting chills, rather they buttress and give shape to the story’s overarching trajectory and the rationale behind various actions. Who protects Robyn in the Dark Place? Who puts so much on the line to save her? The story is rife with parries and counter-parries, ego and altruism: it’s constructed half in violence, half in tenderness: a veritable literary pandemonium. This is a wild, unsettling read and the ending in particular will harden in memory like amber, but it is vital to see the wood for trees because beneath the talons and the curses, beats the heart of a novel that distinguishes beauty. Supported by that, how could anything tip truly sideways?
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