For young Mark, the world has turned as bleak and gray as the Brighton winter. Separated from his real father and home in London, he's come to live with his mother and her new husband in an old house near the sea. He spends his days alone, trying to master the skateboard, while other boys his age are in school. He hates the unwanted stepfather who barged into Mark's life to rob him of joy. Worst of all, his once-vibrant mother has grown listless and weary, no longer interested in anything beyond her sitting room.
But on a damp and chilly evening, an accident carries Mark into the basement flat of the old woman who lives at the bottom of his stepfather's house. She offers tea, cakes, and sympathy . . . and the key to a secret, bygone world. Mark becomes caught up in the frenetic bustle of the human machinery that once ran a home, and drawn ever deeper into a lost realm of spirits and memory. Here below the suffocating truths, beneath the pain and unhappiness, he finds an escape, and quite possibly a way to change everything.
A richly evocative, poignantly beautiful modern-day ghost story, The Servants marks the triumphant return of Michael Marshall Smith—the first novel in a decade from the multiple award-winning author of Spares.
When 11-year-old Mark moves with his ill mother and hated stepfather to the English resort town Brighton, he discovers that their new house holds a secret. In the long unused servants' quarters, the past is alive, and the servants are still at work. At first this orderly world comforts Mark, who hates how his family has fallen apart. He sees signs, however, that the servants' world is also failing, and its disorder is finding its way into his present reality. To restore harmony to his home, Mark has to venture into the servants' quarters and fix what has broken. The realism of both present-day Brighton and its past, rich in period detail, makes the connections between them especially eerie, though it is a leap to believe that Mark, in aiding the servants, eases his mother's cancer. Mark's frustrations and selfishness are in keeping with his age, and he does some believable growing up. Hutley, Krista
Description:
For young Mark, the world has turned as bleak and gray as the Brighton winter. Separated from his real father and home in London, he's come to live with his mother and her new husband in an old house near the sea. He spends his days alone, trying to master the skateboard, while other boys his age are in school. He hates the unwanted stepfather who barged into Mark's life to rob him of joy. Worst of all, his once-vibrant mother has grown listless and weary, no longer interested in anything beyond her sitting room.
But on a damp and chilly evening, an accident carries Mark into the basement flat of the old woman who lives at the bottom of his stepfather's house. She offers tea, cakes, and sympathy . . . and the key to a secret, bygone world. Mark becomes caught up in the frenetic bustle of the human machinery that once ran a home, and drawn ever deeper into a lost realm of spirits and memory. Here below the suffocating truths, beneath the pain and unhappiness, he finds an escape, and quite possibly a way to change everything.
A richly evocative, poignantly beautiful modern-day ghost story, The Servants marks the triumphant return of Michael Marshall Smith—the first novel in a decade from the multiple award-winning author of Spares.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. At the start of Smith's superb, offbeat contemporary fantasy, 11-year-old Mark has moved to Brighton, a decaying English resort town, with his sickly mother and her new husband, David. Mark hates David, hates his parents' divorce and hates Brighton, where he has no friends and little to do. Then the old lady who lives in the tiny apartment beneath David's recently purchased townhouse takes him on a tour of the old servants' quarters. When Mark sneaks into the quarters on his own, he begins to see the long-dead servants at their jobs and realizes that something is seriously wrong. As this secret downstairs world becomes more and more disordered, Mark discovers that its problems are somehow related to his mother's advancing illness. If he can help the servants, he may just be able to save her life. IHG Award–winner Smith (Spares) portrays a child's irrational anger with devastating accuracy, and Mark's visits to the surreal and intensely symbolic world of the servants are powerfully depicted. (July)
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From Booklist
When 11-year-old Mark moves with his ill mother and hated stepfather to the English resort town Brighton, he discovers that their new house holds a secret. In the long unused servants' quarters, the past is alive, and the servants are still at work. At first this orderly world comforts Mark, who hates how his family has fallen apart. He sees signs, however, that the servants' world is also failing, and its disorder is finding its way into his present reality. To restore harmony to his home, Mark has to venture into the servants' quarters and fix what has broken. The realism of both present-day Brighton and its past, rich in period detail, makes the connections between them especially eerie, though it is a leap to believe that Mark, in aiding the servants, eases his mother's cancer. Mark's frustrations and selfishness are in keeping with his age, and he does some believable growing up. Hutley, Krista