Great Granny Webster - Softcover

With crisp, detached economy (only a little over 100 pages), Blackwood's unnamed and rather faceless narrator gives us her genteel but bizarre family history. There's Great Granny Webster, who lives on and on and on in the role of England's leading kill-joy - doing nothing, despising pleasure, never smiling, hoarding money, sitting in a straight-backed chair in a house in a "stagnant suburb" near Brighton. And then there's Great Granny's daughter, the narrator's Grandmother, who has long been in an asylum - she tried to kill her grandson (crying "bad blood!") at his christening - but before that had a romantically fey reign at her long-suffering husband's run-down castle in Ulster, where she became obsessed with elves and fairies. And the third aberrant generation is represented by Aunt Lavinia (the mad-woman's daughter), a much-married play-girl and devil-may-care girl prone to chic suicide attempts (she finally succeeds). All these weirdnesses are reported with a slightly edgy calm, an odd tone perhaps intended to make us wonder whether this matter-of-fact narrator hasn't herself been infected by the family looniness - especially since, on the last page, Great Granny Webster's white cremated remains (she has finally died) are accidentally blown all over the narrator's black funeral clothes. This final scene, like all the others in Blackwood's cool follow-up to her dark Step-Daughter debut (1977), catches the eye and interest without ever touching anything in the remote area of the heart. (Kirkus Reviews)