The Turning (review)

In this contemporary treatment of Henry James' famous The Turn of the Screw, Jack is going to a remote island for the summer to nanny a couple of kids, hoping to earn enough money to enable him to attend a pricey college along with his beloved girlfriend, Sophie. The children, Miles and Flora, prove to be quiet and odd, and the cook, Mrs. Gross, tells Jack about their attachment to a pair of previous employees, Lucy and Norris, who engaged in disturbing psychological mind games and died in violence after leaving the island. Jack then begins to see both Norris and Lucy, but are the visions a figment of his imagination, an artifact of his sudden illness, or a genuine and threatening ghostly visitation? Prose creates some compelling contemporary analogues to James' set-up, and Jack is a great patsy, with a hearty cluelessness that makes him seem doomed from the get-go. His disintegration is effectively conveyed, with his change particularly marked by his increasingly accusing and frantic tone toward Sophie. The epistolary format undercuts the chill factor by distancing it, though, and the original story's famous ambiguity ends up being more of a muddle here, leaving readers confused rather than intriguingly mystified. Adele Griffin's Turn of the Screw update, Tighter (BCCB 5/11), is therefore a more successful freestanding read, but this will certainly divert readers with a taste for spooky happenings on lonely islands, and it would be interesting to read James, Griffin, and this title together.