Book Review: ‘The Thirteenth Tale’ by Diane Setterfield

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is a stand alone gothic style historical mystery which is split between the past and present day.

From the blurb I was expecting a classic haunted house tale that followed two families as they lived in the same house across two different time periods. Instead this book is a bit different. In the present day Margaret Lea has been hired by famous writer Vida Winter to write her biography before she dies. After years of misdirection about her upbringing, Vida is finally ready to tell the troubled story of the March family and Angelfield House.

I very nearly stopped reading The Thirteenth Tale early on. The book is 456 pages long and the first 68 pages are spent setting up the biographer connection between Margaret and Vida as well as Margaret’s love of books. I found this opening section incredibly dull and slow paced. To give the book a fair chance I decided to read the first section of the past storyline before I decided whether to give up on the novel. Thankfully I enjoyed the past chapters a lot more than the present day ones.

We learn very early on that Angelfield was destroyed in a fire and that Vida Winter is not the character’s original name. The core plotline of the story revolves around Margaret working out what caused the fire and who Vida really is.

The book definitely improved as the story went on. The more I learnt about Angelfield and its inhabitants the more I wanted to keep reading. Setterfield’s gradual reveal of the puzzle pieces made reading this mystery book a satisfying experience. There’s a few twists and entertaining diversions along the way, both in the past and in Margaret’s investigations of the present day Angelfield village and house, until we get the grand unveiling at the end. I didn’t guess the final twist and I really liked how it made me re-evaluate parts of the story I’d already read.

Despite finding Margaret’s present day investigations engaging for me the biggest problem with the novel, aside from its opening chapters, was its other present day plotline where Margaret thinks she is going mad.

As a child she learnt that she had a twin sister who died as a baby – a twin she has no memory of. Despite this sad knowledge causing her no issues for twenty years, once Margaret encounters Vida she starts imagining that her reflection is her dead twin. My problem with this plotline is that it doesn’t go anywhere. The only purpose in making Margaret a twin is to give her a reason to listen to Vida’s story (which also features twin girls) and her brief dip into madness isn’t relevant to the wider story. In fact after she makes herself ill, collapses, then awakens again the madness is spontaneously cured. Unfortunately, rather than being an interesting side plot, Margaret’s personal story often felt more of a distraction to the main story than an enhancement of it.

Needless to say I have very mixed feelings towards The Thirteenth Tale. I would give 10/10 stars to the past storyline which explores the history of Angelfield – the book is worth reading for this alone. But I can only give 5/10 stars to the present day storyline whose saving grace is the chapters set in modern day Angelfield where Margaret finds clues to what happened in the past.

In another positive the novel does end well with a conclusion that wraps up all the loose threads.

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