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Oct/Nov 2011 www.esb.ie/em
Life
Snow Joke
Driving in winter conditions
Health & Habitat, page 34
Worth its weight in gold
Finance
Life, page 37
Image in-box
a selection of your photography
By Kathleen Thorne
BOOK REVIEW
The Man in the Picture
By Susan Hill
Published by Profile books
Price €4.12
Dr Theo Parmitter, an elderly Cambridge don, has a dramatic story to tell about an old Venetian painting that he acquired as a younger man.
Oliver, a former student of Parmitter’s, visits him at his rooms in Cambridge. Here he is compelled by Theo to hear the story from start to finish.
No sooner had Theo bought the painting at an auction, he explains, than someone else, through an intermediary, showed a kind of desperation to get it. Theo refused to part with it and there the matter rests for many years. Eventually an elderly woman from Yorkshire, Lady Hawdon, discovers its whereabouts and indicates that she wants to buy it. She invites Theo to Yorkshire and compels him to hear her extraordinary tale about the picture’s evil power.
The perpetrator of the evil is a woman called Clarissa Vigo. She is the woman whom Lady Hawdon ousted from her engagement to the desirable young Count Hawdon. Clarissa’s desire for vengeance becomes insatiable. It endures through two generations of the Hawdon family and then through to Theo and his student Oliver.
This is an eerie story of preternatural happenings surrounding a seemingly innocuous painting of revellers enjoying a typical Venetian carnival. However, there is nothing innocuous about the evil that touches anyone who has dealings with this picture.
Susan Hill tells the story with a skilful ability to create tension. The reader, however, must suspend all attempts to apply normal logic to the reported events. It is a Halloween tale to be read at one sitting, but not in the dark hours when one’s imagination could take hold and frighten one to death!
