Raves and Recommendations
The Girl in a Swing Is the Best Ghost Story You’ve Never Read
There was a lot more to Richard Adams than bunnies
To those with only a cursory knowledge of Richard Adams’ work, The Girl in a Swing seems like an outlier in his bibliography. If you investigate further (as I did for this piece), you realize how mistaken this assumption is.
Like many, I knew about Watership Down through cultural osmosis. I’d never read the novel or seen the entirety of the movie based on it. I knew it was heavy for a story about bunnies. I knew it had literary merit and was one of those Important Books. I knew the movie had scarred generations of kids. Additionally, I was aware of The Plague Dogs; it’s less celebrated than Watership but still managed to get its own animated film adaptation (featuring the voice of John Hurt, no less.) Far fewer people, I believe, have heard of The Plague Dogs, and those who have, don’t necessarily know it’s from the same person who scribed Watership.
Prior to coming across Girl, Adams was, to me, an author famous exclusively for writing Sad, Scary Stories About Anthropomorphized Animals. It’s the reason I was intrigued when I saw “Author of Watership Down” on the front cover of Girl. I found Girl, by chance, years ago in the horror section of a secondhand bookstore. There were several mentions of eroticism in the accolades printed on the first couple of pages, as well as in the synopsis on the back, and it was a real WTF moment: since when did The Rabbit Guy write anything steamy with ghosts in it??
Turns out, while animals did make up a good portion of Adams’ creative output — and his personal interests–he penned human-filled, sex-filled fantasy novels, too. Shardik, a novel that preceded Girl, was set in a realm with slave traders who enjoyed tormenting children. The titular character in it was a bear, sure, but it had no conscious thought. Maia, a sort of prequel to Shardik, involved teenaged “bed-slaves,” one of whom gets off upon seeing another girl whipped and sold for disobedience. There are B-movie/exploitation movie levels of wanton sapphism and attempted rape.
All this from The Rabbit Guy! Damn, are we ever a long way from the warren.
In 1988, Adams released a historical novel with an immensely bonkers premise: Traveller told the life story of Robert E. Lee — which is already bizarre enough, perhaps especially coming from a very British man born in 1920 — but told it specifically from the POV of his most prized horse. The horse narrated the whole thing in a Southern accent to a cat in a barn. In 2006, in what I believe was his last completed novel before he died in 2016, Adams produced what was arguably the inverse of Traveller — Daniel, the life story of an enslaved man who goes on to become an abolitionist. Strewn across this genuinely kind-of-all-over-place oeuvre were pretty picture book collaborations, an autobiography, an epic poem based on Polynesian myths, and a documentation of his journey through the Antarctic.
Richard Adams was actually, in ways both admirable and iffy, a good deal more than just The Rabbit Guy — which brings me back to The Girl In a Swing, a mostly forgotten effort from 1980 that is my absolute favourite ghost story. Despite allegedly being a nationwide bestseller when it was released and receiving loads of praise (from The New York Times, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, etc.), I haven’t heard anyone bring up this novel ever. Without random luck, I could’ve gone my whole life never knowing it existed (Such a terrible fate, barely avoided!) I now consider it my duty to save others — save you — from an empty, Girl-less future. I shall accomplish this by illustrating exactly why this particular tale of a haunting is so effective.
(Warning: All the spoilers ahead!)
Initially, I was about to sell Girl to you as an exceptional ghost story with minimal ghost stuff. The deep dive I envisaged would get christened something like My Favourite Ghost Story Barely Has A Ghost In It At All. If I hadn’t returned to the book to refresh my memory, I would’ve described it as mainly the analysis of a man–one used to being an “old head on young shoulders” and a “non-starter in the Aphrodite stakes”–getting swept up in a life-altering passion. I remembered Girl keeping its cards close to the chest until it was practically at the finish line. It was a mature drama that escalated sharply and nightmarishly when there wasn’t more than 15 or 20% of the book left. This nightmarish revelation, the scene with the explicit confirmation of a ghost, crystallized in my mind.
Indications of some supernatural element, I would’ve said, were few and far between. The haunting was like clouds gathering on a sunny day without you noticing; you don’t notice until the heavens abruptly open up. You don’t notice until it’s too late. I would’ve said the haunting was well-concealed. And I would’ve been totally wrong. The extent of my wrongness was quite a compelling discovery, and it caused me to appreciate the book more than I already did. The supernatural is not a bomb dropped with little warning; the set-up is there from the start. Hints are abundant and placed strategically. There’s still a deliberate, measured climb to the crescendo I recalled, but clues get supplied regularly and develop a pattern. The dark secret of the plot is alluded to incessantly, and it’s so satisfying in retrospect. The calculated accumulation of signs functions — ironically, as you’ll see — like a leaky faucet; it’s a steady, increasingly maddening drip-drip-drip of information. Such drips on a rock, over a long enough period, will erode it–will bore a hole right through the stone. And that is how the haunting in Girl feels; it’s a gradual, inevitable erosion. The spectre is a hole forming and widening in the world of our main characters — taking its time to do so but indisputably doing so.
Girl’s protagonist, Alan Desland, is an Englishman in the mid-1970s. He’s a good man, albeit a bit of a fuddy-duddy–which he readily acknowledges. He’s well-read and close with his mother and sister. He never did connect with the hippie movement and his preferred hobbies are languages and ceramics. Ceramics becomes his job, too, when he takes over his deceased father’s shop. He shifts its focus from casual dinnerware and similar things to antique pottery and porcelain. His endeavour is a success, and he jaunts to other European countries to buy and sell rare and/or distinctly beautiful pieces. He usually visits Denmark since he’s fluent in Danish, and it’s here where he meets Käthe Wasserman (whose name was changed in later reprints to Karin since some woman with the original name threatened to sue for libel. Fun fact!) Käthe is a German in her 20s working in Copenhagen, and Alan is knocked on his ass by his first glimpse of her. It isn’t her physical traits alone that are entrancing; it’s her whole aura. She’s the opposite of Alan in innumerable ways; aside from being a tad younger, she’s more uninhibited and instinctual. Yet, they mutually fall into an inferno-like ardour that seems part destiny, part addiction.
Käthe comes to England, and she and Alan marry almost immediately, though he knows next to nothing about her background; she’s had intervals of being cryptic. His family members are a smidge concerned, but Käthe is charming and wins them — and everybody else — over. Alan becomes a rapt student at his new wife’s School of Carnal Bliss; he overcomes self-esteem issues and experiences cosmic happiness under her fleshy tutelage (Putting it in less poetic terms, he becomes a bangin’ machine.) Käthe decides to study ceramics to help Alan with his career as much as she helps him in the bedroom. She eventually surprises him with a porcelain figurine she bid for at a job lot, hoping it would be worth something. This figurine, of a girl in a swing, winds up being a legendary 18th-century ornament, with only two others like it in the whole world (one being at the V&A in London and the other residing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.) Inadvertently, Käthe has procured something that will make them rich for the rest of their days. She’s simply the ideal woman, and it’s hard to think of an area of Alan’s life she fails to improve. There may be an odd or unsettling occurrence here or there, but these are no trouble to brush off when almost every day is radiant! Zoom out and the big picture is so lovely overall that the small cracks are hardly perceptible!
So what if Käthe awkwardly declined to marry Alan in a church, stiffened at the suggestion of a white wedding, and wouldn’t tell him why?
So what if he caught her mysteriously weeping by herself, as if over “a bitter loss past all mending”?
So what if, on the lone occasion she joined Alan at a church service, she grew palpably uncomfortable and passed out?
We’ve all awoken in the middle of the night imagining we heard water trickling and splashing, only to locate zero running taps and no burst pipes when we searched the house!
Each of us can recount walking on a nice afternoon and then, out of the clear blue, being rooted to the spot by a violent ripple of fear! By an invisible entity that “stilled the land like a pestilence”!
You get the point. Something is amiss,obviously, irrespective of sexy sex and jackpot figurines. Something menacing strains to penetrate the surface during the bulk of the narrative until, finally, it prevails — manifesting from the sea and staggering onto the shore. It comes toward our couple, who, by that juncture, have been driven half-insane: It’s the reanimated corpse of a drowned child, skin grey and slipping off the bone. It’s Samara Morgan long before Samara Morgan. It’s Käthe’s murdered daughter, felled by her own mother’s hand.
Wait, what?? Käthe’s murdered daughter??! Yep.
Ok, let’s rewind: Käthe — beautiful, frisky Käthe — was a single mother when Alan first encountered her in Denmark. She had a little girl out of wedlock and felt a degree of shame about it. When Alan started courting her, she was keen to reciprocate but was positive he’d bolt if she were candid about her situation. He had to fly back to England, and her obligations prevented her from joining him. This clarifies her evasiveness from earlier on, her unwillingness to let him accompany her home, and her glum mood as dates with him were drawing to a close. She wished she could do what she pleased but never could, not as long as she was responsible for a child.
And so, she killed her child. She took her out of town one day after accepting Alan’s proposal. She took her where neither would be recognized, “where the shore is more accessible and in places more lonely.” She drowned her and caught the plane to England.
Käthe had told Alan she must tie up a few loose ends before starting her new life with him. He went back to the UK as an enthusiastically engaged man and waited for some notification from her. It came incredibly fast; she seemed to have tended to everything in a matter of days. She had quit her job, briefing her boss about leaving the country (but not about having a fiancé, since “there’s no need to be telling everything to everybody.”) She claimed to be very excited and very impatient to reunite with Alan at Heathrow; he was pumped full of oxytocin and utterly unsuspicious. When she touches down, she looks “preoccupied rather than expectant” as she pushes her three suitcases “on a wire trolley rather as though she were wheeling a pram.” Alan, however, chalks it up to fatigue from travel. When he calls to her, and she spots him, she breaks into a smile. “As though,” conveys Alan, “On a holiday, I had wakened her to the prospect of a long summer day of delightful pleasure.”
While the pair make their way through the busy airport, Alan notes that his bride-to-be still appears “a trifle on edge.” She declares the strain of the journey is behind her, yet yelps in fright and grabs Alan’s arm when a young girl careens past them, playing tag with a friend. A few people turn and stare at her excessive reaction, but Alan says he was a bit startled himself. He gently advises Käthe to, essentially, keep calm and carry on.
“Oh, I’m sorry; it’s just that I’m tired Alan,” she responds. “I thought–oh, you know how sometimes on a journey you say to yourself it’s the end and then it isn’t quite the end, so you get–what is it?–scratchy.”
The foreshadowing and symbolism in just a few paragraphs, from just the depiction of Käthe’s arrival in England, are remarkably rich. Such details are everywhere; they don’t make much of an impact when reading the novel for the first time ( you take them at face value, not knowing any better), but I can’t emphasize enough how impressive they make a re-read. Richard Adams’ excellent control, his mastery over every aspect of this story, takes centre stage. He was never writing off the cuff; every allegory and metaphor chosen meticulously.
A component within Girl that got eclipsed by the mental image I carried of a ghost girl lurching toward her treacherous mother and her mother’s lover was Alan’s psychic ability. It’s not a very flashy psychic ability, but that’s fitting for a not-very-flashy man. At the beginning of Alan’s personal history, he relays his participation in the extra-sensory perception experiments of his assistant science teacher (he was 16.) After passing a few tests, which made him a little fretful, Alan gets coaxed to wait outside a room as the professor and his wife concentrate on a single idea in conjunction. Alan gets welcomed back in and invited to verify what they’d been thinking of. An awful sensation creeps up on him, a “choking nausea”; he’s overwhelmed by a realization that “the world…was nothing but dreary place, a mean, squalid dump, whose inhabitants were condemned forever to torment each other for no reason and no purpose but for the pleasure of cruelty.” He collapses to the floor and vomits, gasping, “Christie! Christie!”
Mr. and Mrs. Cook — the prof and his wife– had been thinking of John Christie, an English serial killer, rapist and possible necrophiliac who hid bodies in his house and garden and got hanged in 1953.
Alan is cleaned up, calmed down and strongly advised to never “try to do anything like this again.” Mr. Cook says neither he nor his wife will ever talk about it to anyone and encourages Alan to do the same: “Look, Desland, you’ve evidently got some…gift or faculty. Now, listen–-let it alone.” This comes full circle when, after learning of Käthe’s crime, learning the forlorn spirit of Käthe’s daughter was as real as the sun or the moon, and becoming a widower, Alan commits himself to No Telling.
“I am left alone with No Telling,” he laments. “What I know I can tell to no one — not to my mother, not to my beloved sister or my priest. No Telling has set me apart, solitary as the sleepless King of the Grove, the slave of Nemi with his drawn sword.”
Alan’s ESP plays a recurring role in the novel. It’s a fairly subtle mechanism, but it’s key to a myriad of inklings readers will receive–-after all, the story unfolds from Alan’s first-person perspective. His ESP creates a link from him to the ghost and vice versa, whether he wants it or not (he doesn’t) and whether he understands it or not (he doesn’t at first and is merely perturbed.) Throughout his short, ultimately tragic relationship with Käthe, Alan detects a lot of vibes; they’re intense and loud, and they grip him arbitrarily. Sometimes, the vibe is pitch-black, a sorrow he can’t account for, an oppressive sadness. Other times, it’s like the sheer terror of something being eaten alive. The dead daughter is trying to communicate with him, trying to get his attention, trying urgently to reach her mother through Alan. She’s trying to express her anguish and bewilderment over what’s happened to her.
The ghost and her signals are chilling, of course, but, above all, they are pathetic. This quality has dug into me like a splinter. The little girl is not an angry ghost, she’s a child ghost; killed before she could adequately grasp concepts like life and death. She doesn’t quite get that her mother has killed her. It doesn’t dawn on her that she’s been betrayed. She misses Käthe and just wants to get back to her. The one instance where we hear the ghost’s “voice” — excluding all the bouts of disembodied crying — is when Alan attempts to place a long-distance call to Copenhagen. Wires are crossed, and he’s briefly inundated with snippets of stranger’s conversations before there’s a “succession of gurgling, water noises.” He’s about to hang up when the line rapidly clears, and a child speaks: “Mummy? Mummy, I’m coming as fast as I can.” The little voice is German, and Alan tries to reassure her. He says he’s not her mother, and the lines are mixed up, but she shouldn’t worry.
“But you know my Mummy, don’t you?” the little voice implores.“Tell her–tell her…I’m coming — soon — only it’s such a long way.”
I find these words shudder-worthy. They make the climax of the small, decomposing body rising from the ocean worse because they allow you to visualize the arduous pilgrimage: Here’s the ghost of a murdered child, built almost purely out of yearning, dragging itself across the floor of the English Channel. It trundles for weeks, perhaps for the entire six weeks of Alan and Käthe’s marriage. It’s frightened and largely uncomprehending but determined to find its mother who mistakenly left it behind. It is innocent, still so very innocent, and this crushes both Käthe and the reader alike. You see, it isn’t ghost powers that send Käthe to her own early grave; it’s guilt. Technically, medically, it’s an ectopic pregnancy. But, at the core, Alan knows it is guilt. He knows, and we know. When the dead girl reaches the beach, she doesn’t attack her mother — there’s scarcely a confrontation. Alan and Käthe, in their frenzy, flee in different directions as the ghost emerges (each learns what ramifications befell the other later on when both get admitted to the same hospital.) The ghost doesn’t give chase. It doesn’t so much as lay a finger on them; a retaliation like that never did seem like its goal. Even the phenomena which forced the couple from their house, into their car and to the far-off beach for a reprieve were not akin to anything out of The Poltergeist. It amounted to lots of strange noises, a high wind, an upset stomach for Alan, and the phone ringing ceaselessly. Regardless, Käthe dies.
It’s ironic, a sadistic alignment of the stars, that Käthe died due to a deadly pregnancy — that she killed a child and a “child” killed her. It’s perfectly ironic (and perfectly ghoulish) that after Käthe’s death, an employee at Alan’s shop tearfully pronounces Käthe would have made “such a wonderful mother.” It’s ironic, in hindsight, that Käthe resolutely put an injured seagull out of its misery with her bare hands on the streets of Copenhagen when no one else would. Alan congratulated her, saying he never could’ve done it. “Oh, but sometimes things have to be done, Alan,” she announced. “There’s no sense in holding back or pretending otherwise, is there?”
“Nothing turns my stomach,” she promised. “Nothing.”
Richard Adams, in his brilliance, positions the reader so that, by the story’s conclusion, you feel transparent sympathy for Käthe. What she did was wicked, but you’re convinced she’s not a monster. You don’t judge the tenderness Alan still has for her and her memory, and you aren’t offended by his vow of No Telling. It’s a vow he’s forthcoming about taking, not so much because he doesn’t think anyone will believe him about the haunting, but because he aims to protect Käthe’s reputation. The vow pains him, further isolating him in his grief, but he’ll stick to it — and it feels noble. You aren’t on the fence about supporting his decision. You aren’t of the view that his morals have gotten skewed, that his loyalty has blinded his capacity to see his wife’s deed for what it was. The deed was repugnant. This is an objective truth nobody is arguing against — not Alan, not Käthe and not the creator of the text. Alan loves her anyway. He loves her because it’s now in his blood to do so. He wasn’t infatuated or unmitigatedly drunk on sex; he was in love (with her good side, her bad side and all that lay in between.) When you love a person (romantically or otherwise), revoking your love when they do something you don’t condone can’t be done in a snap. Whether you should still love the person is irrelevant; you just will. It’s a shrapnel wound, and there will be retained fragments — check out the saga of the parents who continue to love their son after he killed their daughter.
Alan is not in denial. There is no tiny sliver of him thinking Maybe she didn’t do it?? or Maybe we were hallucinating a ghost?? Adams couldn’t be any more direct about this when he has Alan say, “I cannot justify my resentment of the death of Käthe. It was appointed that she should die. Yet though I cannot justify it, in my heart I wish I had shared both in what she did and what she underwent.”
Due to the strength of Adams’ writing and the emotional odyssey we go on as Alan — viewing Käthe through Alan’s eyes — our answer to the question Did Käthe Deserve It? can only be Well, yes, but it’s complicated. Is the dead daughter the #1 victim in all this? Well, yes, but. In a weaker story by an inferior talent it would be less complicated. As it stands, Käthe never strikes us as evil — as desperate and misguided, but not evil. She was someone who’d felt cheated by life, and the reader discerns that this sentiment was accurate, albeit inflated. We can guess why she isn’t living in Germany, why it appears she is incommunicado with her parents/family, how she met her daughter’s father, who he was and why he didn’t stay. That she was bruised, lonely, and bored when she met Alan is legible. That she was unaccustomed to men treating her well is also. We don’t get her actual age, but Alan estimates she’s under 25. Still, she isn’t permitted any of the self-indulgences of youth. She’s full of electricity that must be contained, and it sucks. I agree that it sucks! Her frustration isn’t unrelatable, and when she crosses that line which can’t be uncrossed, she’s plagued by omens and devoured by self-loathing. Whatever peace she has is jagged; it’s always interrupted by nasty reminders and harbingers of doom, like the black dog she and Alan bump into on the downs (which, naturally, is a German Shepherd with a name tag that says DEATH — pronounced Day-arth.)
Käthe’s private, protracted suffering, hidden from Alan until she’s too damned drained to pretend for a moment longer — until what she’s been trying to stall bulldozes right over her — is proof of her soul. It’s a stained one, but it’s there. Her final words to Alan, in her native tongue and from a hospital bed, are, “I had no pity.” She believes herself to be Hell-bound, and she embraces it. Her conscience triumphs, and she’s flattened beneath the weight of it. She stops fighting what she knows she deserves, so you can’t hate her. Hate would be too easy. It takes nothing, no contemplation at all, to hate a woman who killed her small child–especially if she did so ostensibly for a man and to be free of a burden. It takes nothing to call her a selfish whore. Categorizing her as you would a cartoon villain is easy. Making her lovable is not. It is a testament to Richard Adams’ skill, nuance, and sensitivity as a novelist that readers will have no doubt about Käthe’s culpability but won’t hate her. Instead, in tandem with Alan, they’ll mourn her. They’ll mourn for the temporary Eden and the decades of contentment that will never be. Instead of hate, they’ll feel a mix of hollow and wistful; the knife twist of a cursed kismet.
Käthe’s acute regret, her strivings to spare Alan from the worst of the haunting, his refusal to desert her, and her eventual choice to quit trying to escape punishment all nullify potential hatred. Alan, affirming to the audience what Käthe conjectured — that her “intuition was not unsound” and that she’d been correct in surveying him as a man who “preferred life to be tidy” — makes hatred for her a difficult thing to come by.
Alan would have balked at the introduction of her daughter.
He would have hesitated to entangle himself with a single mother.
The Girl In A Swing’s goodbye present to us is, predictably, more salt rubbed into our cut: That winning lottery ticket of a figurine, “glazy, smooth and shapely as an acorn,” will never be cashed in. Alan will hold on to it, as he was unable to hold onto Käthe. It once represented millions of dollars/pounds, but now represents something even more enviable — true, everlasting love. Why bother becoming a millionaire without her? The money was for their dreams, their projects, and their leisure. Together. Without her, the statuette contributes more to Alan as a “keepsake and a talisman.”
“Käthe, flesh and dancing spirit, sits in the swing, exquisite as porcelain,” he opines. “Secretly smiling to see that I alone perceive her swinging between the huge, serrated leaves, from earth to sky and back again.”
