It is hard to know what to make of Namita Gokhale's 'Book of Shadows'. Reminded frequently of Isabel Allende's acclaimed 'House of Spirits', the tale is of a similar ethereal ilk. Bitya, a young University lecturer from Delhi has been left permanently disfigured from an acid attack by her former lover's sister. Veiled to hide her disfigurement, she retreats to her childhood home in the Kumaon hills at the foot of the Himalayas to reflect on her life. She lets the house soothe her soul and her housekeeper Lohaniju entertain her with stories. A spirit who also narrates chapters filled with the salacious details of the former owner's lives haunts the house.

Built by an English missionary, William James Cockerell, in 1868 the house is thought, by the superstitious locals, to be situated on a bad spot. It witnesses a sequence of owners, each more bizarre than the next. The English missionary, who meets an untimely death, is followed a Captain Walter Wolcott of the English Army. Somewhat of an aesthete, he takes up with Dona Rosa a clairvoyant wandering through India. Besotted with each other they spend much of their time having sex. Not good sex, but grotesque, ugly, hideous sex. At this point it helps to understand a little about the author.

Born in 1956, the author Namita Gokhale was only 17 when she met Rajiv Gokhale, son of the Law Minister in Indira Gandhi's cabinet. The fell madly in love and were married within six months. Their relationship was reported to be stormy. They moved to Delhi and she wrote her first book 'Paro: Dreams of Passion' in 1984. Hailed as a success, the book caused quite a stir with its erotic overtones and pioneered a sexually frank genre of writing. Whilst working on her second book, Gokhale was struck with cancer of the uterus. She barely survived. A few years later, her alcoholic husband died of liver cirrhosis leaving her to bring up two young daughters. This explains Namita Gokhale's obsession with love, lust and death in equal measure. After all, she has had first-hand experience.

One day three travellers, Nicholas Mann, Nicholas Krutz and Veera, visit the characters in the book, Wolcott and Dona Rosa. They become besotted with the rampant couple and sexual orgies follow. One orgy culminates in the death of Krutz who is killed by the spirits of the mountain. Gokhale hardly spares any of her characters from death. Wolcott is burnt - "death by fire. It is an absolute condition". This makes the English Army take over the house with Osborne, the Colonel Regiment being the next owner. His tenure is even more fleeting and ushers in the homosexual lovers Munro & Marcus who are disciples of the occult.

Gokhale uses mysticism quite liberally. Using the magic of the Himalayas as the backdrop, the book vibrates with the spirits of the hill folk, black panthers, three dead Sherpas allowed to die by Allister Crowley mentor of Captain Wolcott and the spirit of a young girl killed before the house was built, among others! At times it seems Namita Gokhale has given free reign to her imagination.

Munro and Marcus undertake satanic rituals that result in the slaying of a innocent young child described as an "an evolved soul, wandering through time, born only to cause hurt and pain to its mother and light the fire of unforgiving revenge in its Rajput father, and to set in motion an incomprehensible karmic cycle that would destroy everything". And yet this is only in the middle of the book.

Namita Gokhale has a masterful grasp of the English Language and a vivid imagination that lets her spare no one in this story. Not even the benign Catholic priest Father Benedictus. He takes up residence at the haunted house, befriending the spirit who lives behind the curtain with whom he shares many thoughts and experiences. The reader is never told who the ghost might be. The ghost describes itself as "suspended in time & space, without a body, without a context, ignorant of the reasons & circumstance that have led to this strange exile, this cruel isolation".

Although it may isolated, the ghost is hardly ever without owners to haunt. Father Benedictus perishes trying to exorcise the ghosts of the dead Munro & Marcus from the house leaving the house to be occupied by Bitya.

Personally, I found that Bitya's problems faded into memory as the antics of the other owner's were described and I must admit that I cared little about what happened to her. You will have to read the book to find out for yourself although uncharacteristically it is not quite as vile as you might expect. Is Bitya modelled on the author herself? Intelligent, articulate, lonely and afflicted by great pain and loss, it would not be surprising if the author had used her own experiences for this character.

What saddened me most about this book is Namita Gokhale's ability to see the macabre in everything. She beautifully describes butterflies as being unresolved spirits and in then in the next instant their unheard screams as they are pierced with pins for mounting into display cases. Unlike Isabel Allende who can maintain the floating ethereal sensation that her prose evokes, Gokhale sends her readers' feelings crashing down at every turn. Where Allende savours sweetness, Gokhale relishes the grotesque.

Her writing is like a sharp pencil etching out each character and briefly highlighting each shadow in turn. I couldn't help but wonder, though, if it is time for the author to exorcise her own ghosts and move out of the shadows into the light now.

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