The Lost Book of Salem

Katherine Howe

Penguin

Otago Daily Times, July 25th 2009

The Salem witch trials have provided rich literary fodder for writers and academics for many years.  For most, the horrific injustice visited upon innocent women and men is softened by the sense that the world was a very different place then, the persecution a product of a particular social and historical moment that we (in our supposed superiority) would never countenance today. 

In The Lost Book of Salem, Katherine Howe begins from a basic premise, that one of the accused might indeed have been a witch, and proceeds to weave historical detail and contemporary fiction into an engaging modern fairytale. 

Connie Goodwin is a young history graduate who has just been accepted into the PhD programme at Harvard University.   Over the summer holidays, while clearing out her grandmother’s abandoned house in Marblehead MA, she finds a key hidden in an old family bible and tucked into its shaft is a piece of paper inscribed with the name ‘Deliverance Dane”.  Intrigued, Connie searches local historical records for further information, but the only information on Goody Dane concerns her excommunication from the church in 1692 and a list of her possessions at the time of her death.

Connie concludes that Deliverance must have been one of the executed Salem witches, and that a ‘receipt book’ mentioned in her chattels must have contained recipes for the tonics and medicines that led directly or indirectly to her execution.  Although many 17^th Century manuals for finding witches survive, there are no North American examples of instructional texts on the practice of witchcraft, and her supervisor, Professor Chilton, suggests that Deliverance’s book would be an invaluable primary source for a thesis on the history on witchcraft in Puritan society.  An excited Connie agrees, but it soon becomes clear that Chilton’s interest is more than merely academic, and that the contents of the book might be more than mere folk remedies.

The central narrative is well written and nicely paced, and the introduction of magical elements subtle enough to seem almost plausible, but it is the interspersed extracts from the lives of Deliverance, her daughter Mercy, and granddaughter Prudence, that showcase Howe’s skill as a writer and historian. These interludes provide vivid glimpses of Puritan New England life; details of custom, language and dress, and a cast of characters familiar to us from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and other historical sources.

As Howe explains in her postscript, witchcraft was a reality in this religious, pre-scientific community, providing an explanation (and a remedy) for events and illnesses that had no other understandable cause. By anchouring the narrative with such vivid and precise detail, she creates a contemporary space in which magic could plausibly still exist.  The Lost Book of Salem is a novel with a depth and resonance that raises it above the mass market of lightweight ‘new age’ fiction.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/life-long-friendship-light-hearted-farce