Vida Winter, the eccentric dying woman at the heart of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, is in a panic. After decades of fabricating the story of her life to entranced journalists, she has finally acquiesced to one young writer’s plaintive request: “Tell me the truth.” But Margaret, the biographer she’s contracted to tell her story, is walking toward the door. “I will tell you a story!” the old authoress calls after her, to make her come back. Two Once Upon a Times, two false starts—Margaret reaches for the doorknob.
And then: “Once upon a time, there were twins—“
Margaret freezes—the vital chord has been struck. She cannot leave now. And so, our story begins.
For all my experience with novels, I still don’t understand the bewitching qualities of The Thirteenth Tale. It may be the plot, sweeping us elegantly along with its lunatic millionaires, once-grand estates falling into decay, incestuous families, feral twin sisters and family deaths, mysteries, ghosts.
The passages I like best, though, are about reading. At one point, Winter presents our biographer protagonist with a hypothetical moral dilemma: you have a gun, and you are watching a man operate a conveyor belt that’s dumping every copy of every book you’ve ever loved into a blazing inferno. With every second, another copy of Jane Eyre (or For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Catcher in the Rye or…) is destroyed, and soon every copy of the work left in the world will be gone. You have a choice: do you kill him, or do you watch him obliterate these books and their memory?
The moral: books matter, tales matter; we make ourselves through the stories we tell. It is only at the end of the book, as Winter reconciles herself to her terrible origins, that she can at last stop being the ghost of her childhood. The magic lies in the telling of the tale, long ago omitted from her best-selling anthology Thirteen Stories of Change and Desperation, a book that only contained twelve: it is the story of her life, told to Margaret in harsh, ugly words, words like broken glass. But it is her story, and in its telling, she can find peace.
