Dunmore has been doing this from the beginning of her career with Zennor in Darkness and then A Spell of Winter and House of Orphans, all novels capable of haunting the reader's mind for years without ever explicitly invoking the supernatural.
There is a sense in which all period or historical fiction is telling ghost stories, populating the reader's present with voices from beyond the grave, calling up characters into a time that isn't theirs. So The Greatcoat, despite being the first book in Random House's new Hammer imprint ("synonymous with legendary British horror films"), challenges its generic label.
Creepy, yes malevolent, probably but the landlady is, technically, alive, and therefore not a ghost. She paces the floor above Isabel's bed all night, creeps around the young couple's flat while Isabel is out buying their nasty food, and takes an inexplicable interest in the airman's coat hidden at the back of a cupboard. Perhaps the landlady is a better ghost, a Miss Havisham-style figure who is "all grey: grey pinafore, greying hair … seamed face, pursed lips with tiny wrinkles all around them". There is a ghost, in that there is someone present to some but not all of the characters after his death, but he is a well-meaning and sympathetic character, attractive to the reader as well as to Isabel a nice chap who has, as Isabel thinks when she first sees him, got a bit lost. This is billed as Dunmore's first ghost story, but when I finished reading it – at a stately pace, savouring sentences because they are good and you almost know the ending from the beginning – I wanted to argue with that label. Unlike them, however, Isabel is not moving on into the social and culinary experiments of the 60s but gazing back into her wartime childhood and her landlady's unresolved grief for a lost lover. The heroine Isabel and her husband Philip don't notice Isabel's overcooked steak and kidney pudding and dense cakes, reminding me of AS Byatt's Frederica and Stephanie Potter in the same postwar Yorkshire. Dunmore's fiction has inhabited the 1940s and 50s for a decade now, and what might in less skilled hands feel like "period detail" seems natural here: the poor quality meat still rationed when the young lovers of the war have turned grey, the eking out of coal to last a Yorkshire winter. The Greatcoat is set in the same postwar era as Helen Dunmore's last novel, The Betrayal, but swaps St Petersburg for a Yorkshire town and its abandoned airbase.
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