A masterly drawn character, an involving yarn, beautifully written, brimfull with acute observations and delightful cameos. A puzzling mixture of realism and fantasy.
Boombana
Publications
The Haunting of Dr McCuaig
by Kelver HARTLEY
Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 1997
Novel
(256 pages, 205 x 135 mm, sewn PB, ISBN 0958668523)
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When a respectable academic dares to meddle in spiritualism, a whole new world opens up for him. There he finds food for his intellectual curiosity, answers for his yearnings -- and love. But he also stumbles across disturbing happenings and mysterious deaths, and finds that he has risked his career and his sanity...
A masterly drawn character, an involving yarn, beautifully written, brimfull with acute observations and delightful cameos. A puzzling mixture of realism and fantasy. |
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By Kelver HARTLEY, famous as the "millionaire Professor in the $20-a-week room".
Kelver Hartley was Foundation Professor of French at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He spent his last years living as a pauper while accumulating for the students of French of his university a legacy valued at close to $2 million and left behind him the manuscript of this fascinating novel.
| EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS |
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"I didn't expect it to be very good. I began dutifully; at least I would read a few pages. In fact, I finished it. I enjoyed it immensely ... [The] protagonist ... is an academic, ... supercilious but sharp-eyed, witty, delighting in curious facts and obscure words, deliciously cruel in his observation of his colleagues, a flawed, awkward, suffering person who arouses our sympathy. The plot is dramatic and bizarrely original, with death and violence and danger ... Hartley creates sensitive perceptive images of the kind which are one of the things literature is about, that make you gasp with recognition and delight and surprise, all at once. His subject is death and what that means for life, and he brings it alive with disturbing clarity."
Marion Halligan, Australian Book Review, no. 199 (April 1998), p. 31 |
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"A good novel should challenge the reader and get the little grey cells working, reminding us that reading is, at its best, an active pursuit ... In these terms this is a good novel ... Do not be misled into thinking it is a Stephen King chiller although the title and the bare bones of the plot on the back cover might suggest similarity ... This novel is too steeped in cultural references, too loaded with subtle allusions, too full of acute observations upon life for simple categorisation. This is a novel that compels sustained attention even if it is perhaps overwritten ... Because of its very qualities the book will not be eveyone's cup of tea. But those who ... relish heady language, will find the experience rewarding." Lionel Farrell, Newcastle Herald, 6/12/97 |
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Last updated 25/2/07 
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