The Bracknels: A Family Chronicle

by Forrest Reid

A study of the unpleasant family of a Belfast merchant whose youngest child is Denis; "morbid, dreamy, the victim of delusions, engaging in strange pagan worship, yet with amiable traits". Rewritten as DENIS BRACKNEL.

"THE BRACKNELS (1911) is the work which Mr. Reid regards as the foundation stone of his literary career. It is a remarkable study of an abnormal boy, a moon-worshipper, who is obsessed and haunted by the malignant influences of an old house, his home, reputed in earlier times to have been the scene of a murder. Just as in the case of the boy in Henry James's finest supernatural story, "The Turn of the Screw," Denis Bracknel is killed by the forces of evil that have reached him from another plane. Individual opinion may object to the manner in which the final tragedy occurs; but the whole story is bathed in that sense of terror and impending doom which Sheridan Le Fanu could so portentously convey, and compels admiration" .

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1911

About the author

Forrest Reid was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was, along with Hugh Walpole and J.M. Barrie, a leading pre-war British novelist of boyhood. He is still acclaimed as the greatest of Ulster novelists and was recognised with the award of the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom.

Reviews

[Martyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twenty-two months ago I owned no Forrest Reid books. Now I own, and have finished reading, all twenty-six of his books, several of which titles I have read multiple times). He has long been an established favourite of mine and he is an author whose novels I imagine I will continue to revisit with a degree of regularity. A lot of novels aimed at adults bore me, but Reid never does. He always avoids the mundane. He always touches the emotions. He's not unwholesome and yet he's often dark. There is rarely any concluding feel-good factor, and yet you are never left regretting the emotional reading experience. The pain and discomfort feel worth it. He's a real gem of a writer and I don't know why his name isn't on the curriculum of every English literature course.

I would have to read The Bracknels back to back with Denis Bracknel in order to compare the two versions, but this first version feels just as worthy of five stars as the later version did.

Admittedly Rusk, as a character, rather irritates me - I never really get him. He never feels particularly upright. It's like he's young and good looking and rather personable and everyone around him admires him and projects their own ideals upon - imagining him to be the man they want him to be, while in reality you are never quite sure who he is or what he is because he's too busy trying to placate everyone. Too often he seems to be striving to say what people want to hear without giving the impression that he is being honest, and too often it seems that way in his dealings with Denis - humouring him in his fancies (as Rusk perceives them) without ever taking them very seriously - hence the tragic outcome.

The five stars is for the feelings the book stirs up - the mystical and the creepy obviously, but also the general depressing or melancholy feeling that pervades it in the unhappy and troubled Denis, a youth whose life should be fun and easy and carefree. And instead it is just one ongoing struggle - or rather, it is like he is living in his own world, like anyone struggling with mental health problems or with a social disorder or anxiety. He's living in the same world as everyone around him and yet experiencing everything and perceiving everything in very different ways - ways which they cannot understand. So he's lonely and isolated. And Rusk is as much a stranger to that world as everyone else, just as unsypathetic towards it, just as dismissive, regardless of how much he pretends to understand. And I think that is the tragedy of it, that he pretends to understand but underneath it all Denis has to battle on alone. The companionship and emotional support may buoy Denis up a bit, but he's still very much on his own at the end of the day.

The book stirred up all sorts of rather melancholy and painful memories of my own childhood, of some things I had forgotten - or which I at least rarely think of. It's not a particularly pleasant walk down memory lane, but that doesn't prevent it being an important one. As adults I think it is easy to forget how much things that happen to kids can traumatise them or scar them for life. We might try to suppress things, we might temporarily forget them with the passage of time, but something happens to trigger the memory and the pain or trauma we felt decades ago comes back with full force.