Seizure, by Erica Wagner

Erica Wagner's first novel, after the short stories of Gravity, presents a world in which primeval forces still rule, a place of almost unbearable intensity where love is war and lives are determined by what must be told (stories) and what can never be told (the truth).

Janet Ward has seizures. They come "like a breath of cold metal high in the back of her throat... her own electricity". She is otherwise normal, has a good job and an attentive loving partner. According to her father, her mother died when she was three.

Then she receives news that she has inherited a house, near the sea and far to the north, left by her mother - who died three weeks ago. Astounded and dismayed, Janet collects the key and drives alone to this unknown place "at the end of the world". When she arrives she finds it inhabited. Someone else has a key.

A man named Tom accosts her, insists the house is his and leads her, despite her fear and anger, into the cottage. Over the next two days Janet discovers her past and herself. Succumbing to Tom as to a seizure, she becomes lost to her other life.

Reality and fantasy are sinuously entangled in this passionate novel told in flashbacks, stories from and about the mother who abandoned Janet and Tom (they are half-siblings). The author draws lavishly on Celtic myth, appropriating its sublime lyricism, numinous landscape and awful doom: the devil's ship, the seal woman, the demon who must be clutched by his lover, through frightful metamorphoses, to free him from the thrall of the fairy queen.

I was reminded, too, of Thomas Mann's short story "The Blood of the Volsungs", itself the direct descendant of a composition by another Wagner. In the first act of The Valkyrie, the ill-fated twins Siegmund and Sigelinde also meet in a lonely cottage, recognise each other and fall in forbidden love. In the novel, Wotan's sword, Nothung, is replaced by a bone-handled knife whose wounds release the blood of destiny, an overworked image in this case.

The contemporary Wagner borrows many of opera's tropes and some of its absurdities, teetering at times on an edge where tragic solemnity veers towards the comic. Nevertheless she remains firmly in control of her material which is, like opera, relentless and overwhelming.

What persuades and grips is the writing, which is dense and poetic. Yet its lyricism feels wholly natural, and passages like the ride of the fairy army and a midnight gambol with seals are thrilling. Wagner consistently skirts the purple through an innate toughness and precision.

Janet and Tom are defined by their pain and obsession, and I turned with relief to the more tender episodes involving them and their parents. Janet's father is the most touching character, loving and devoted but weighed down by loss and lies and, like the siblings, under the spell of the disappearing mother who, herself a kind of fairy queen, holds all their psyches hostage. "What makes you what you are holds you... It will pull you back and you'll have no choice." Though I resisted the novel's grim predestination, I admired its daring and yielded to the sheer force of its imagination.

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